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Russia aborted the launch of three astronauts to the International Space Station moments before their scheduled liftoff Thursday, but the crew was safe, officials said. The Russian Soyuz rocket was to carry NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson, Oleg Novitsky of Roscosmos and Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus from the Russian-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan.
The launch was aborted by an automatic safety system about 20 seconds before the scheduled takeoff at 1321 GMT. No cause was immediately given, but NASA said the crew was safe and would be quickly removed from their Soyuz capsule.
Roscosmos did not immediately say when the next launch attempt would take place.
The space station, which has served as a symbol of post-Cold War international cooperation, is now one of the last areas of collaboration between Russia and the West amid tensions over Moscow’s military action in Ukraine. NASA and its partners hope to continue operating the orbital outpost until 2030. For Dyson, this would be his third trip to the orbital complex, where he was to spend six months. Novitsky, who was going to make her fourth flight to the orbital outpost, and Vasilevskaya, on her first space mission as her country’s first astronaut, would return to Earth after spending 12 days in orbit.
The three astronauts would join the station crew consisting of NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara, Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt and Jeanette Epps, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub and Alexander Grebenkin. versions of Soviet-designed rockets for commercial satellites, as well as crews and cargo to the space station.
While the crew was not in danger, Thursday’s aborted launch was a major mishap for the Russian space program. It came after a failed launch in October 2018, when a Soyuz rocket carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos’ Alexei Ovchinin to the International Space Station failed. least two minutes after takeoff, sending their rescue capsule on a steep climb back to a safe landing.
Hague and Ovchinin had a brief period of weightlessness when the capsule separated from the malfunctioning Soyuz rocket at an altitude of about 50 kilometers (31 mi), then endured gravitational forces 6 to 7 times those felt on Earth. when they descended at a sharper angle than normal. The 2018 launch failure was the first such accident for Russia’s manned program in more than three decades.