NASA

was the result of a malfunctioning sensor, which caused the first and second stages of the rocket launching the Soyuz to crash into each other, breaking the second stage and forcing an emergency landing.

The sensor was damaged, Russian officials said, during the rocket’s assembly at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where the Soyuz is launched.

There is still no explanation on what caused the hole in the space station, but the Russians will conduct a spacewalk on Tuesday to look at the Soyuz’s exterior. In the meantime, the patch put in place by the crew still is holding.

NASA has relied on Russia to transport its astronauts to the space station since 2011, when the space shuttle program was shuttered.

Commercial vehicles being built by SpaceX and Boeing are meant to allevi- ate that reliance, but those programs remain behind schedule.

The current crew on the station — NASA’s Serena Auñón-Chancellor, European Space Agency’s Alexander Gerst and Russia’s Sergey Prokopyev — arrived in June and are scheduled to return to Earth on Dec. 20.

Though NASA and Russian officials have not yet determined when Hague will return from the space station, Hague told the Chronicle that his family is ready.

“If my family wasn’t ready, then I wouldn’t be ready,” Hague said. His wife, Catie, is in the Air Force and “is not a stranger to risky situations. She knew going into that first launch that every launch has risk.”

Their boys, ages 8 and 11, were in Kazakhstan for the failed launch in October. They won’t be making the trip this time, however, Hague said.

“They missed two weeks of school in the fall” by coming to the launch, he said. “Doing it in the spring might have adverse impacts. They’ll watch here from Houston.”

Dmitri Lovetsky / Associated Press NASA astronaut Nick Hague waves to his son from a bus prior to the failed launch of a Soyuz rocket on Oct. 11 in Kazakhstan. “I’m excited about it. I’m 100 percent ready to go,” Hague said of the next launch set for Feb. 28.