American, Russian land safely after rocket failure

The problem came just two minutes into the flight: The rocket carrying an American and a Russian to the International Space Station failed Thursday, triggering an emergency that sent their capsule into a steep, harrowing fall back to Earth.

The crew landed safely on the steppes of Kazakhstan, but the aborted mission dealt another blow to the troubled Russian space program that serves as the only way to deliver astronauts to the orbiting outpost. It also was the first such accident for Russia’s manned program in over three decades.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos’ Alexei Ovchinin had a brief period of weightlessness when their capsule separated from the malfunctioning Soyuz rocket at an altitude of about 31 miles, then endured gravitational forces of six to seven times more than is felt on Earth as they came down at a sharperthannormal angle.

About a half hour later, the capsule parachuted onto a barren area about 12 miles east of the city of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan.

“Thank God the crew is alive,” said Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russianmanned launches were suspended pending an investigation into the failure, said Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov.

New NASA Administra tor Jim Bridenstine, who watched the launch at the Russianleased Baikonur cosmodrome with his Russian counterpart, said Hague and Ovchinin were in good condition. Bridenstine added that a “thorough investigation” will be conducted.

Hague, 43, and Ovchinin, 47, lifted off at 2:40 p.m. The astronauts were to dock at the space station six hours later and join an American, a Russian and a German on board.

But the threestage Soyuz rocket suffered an unspecified failure of its second stage just two minutes after launch. Russian news reports indicated that one of its four firststage engines might have failed to jettison in sync with others, resulting in the second stage’s shutdown and activating the automatic emergency rescue system.

For the crew in the capsule, events would have happened very quickly, NASA deputy chief astronaut Reid Wiseman told reporters at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. An emergency light would have come on and, an instant later, the abort motors would fire to pull the capsule away from the rocket.

Wiseman said the only thing that went through his mind was “I hope they get down safe.”

Search and rescue teams scrambled to recover the crew, and paratroopers were dropped to the site.