Soyuz launch is first since liftoff failure

MOSCOW — A Russian Soyuz rocket put a military satellite in orbit Thursday, its first successful launch since a similar rocket failed earlier this month to deliver a crew to the International Space Station.

The Russian military said a Soyuz-2 booster rocket lifted off from the Plesetsk facility in northwestern Russia.

A Soyuz-FG rocket carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos’ Alexei Ovchinin failed two minutes into the flight on Oct. 11, sending their emergency capsule into a sharp fall back to Earth. The crew landed safely, but the Russian space agency Roscosmos had suspended all Soyuz launches until Thursday, pending an investigation.

The official panel is yet to produce its formal verdict, but investigators reportedly have linked the failure to an element jettisoning one of the rocket’s four side boosters from the main stage that apparently had been damaged during final assembly at the Russia-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Russian space officials plan to conduct two other unmanned Soyuz launches before sending a crew to the space station. No date for the crew launch has been set yet, but it’s expected in early December.

The current space station crew — NASA’s Serena Aunon-Chancellor, Russian Sergei Prokopyev and German Alexander Gerst — was scheduled to return to Earth in December after a six-month mission.