A Russian rocket puts the satellite into orbit, the first since failure

MOSCOW (AP) – A Russian rocket Soyuz has put into orbit a military satellite on Thursday, its first successful launch since a similar rocket has failed at the beginning of the month to deliver a crew to the International Space Station.

The Russian army said that a Soyuz-2 booster rocket had taken off from the Plesetsk launch pad in northwestern Russia.

A Soyuz-FG rocket On October 11, NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Alexei Ovchinin of Roscosmos failed two minutes after the start of the flight, returning their emergency capsule to Earth. The crew landed safely, but the Russian space agency Roscosmos has suspended all Soyuz launches until Thursday, pending an investigation.

The official group has not yet made its formal verdict, but the investigators reportedly linked this failure to an element dropping the dropping operation. [Traduction]

Russian space authorities plan to conduct two more unmanned launches of Soyuz before launching a crew to the space station. The launch of the crew has not yet been fixed, but is scheduled for early December.

The current crew of the space station – Serena Aunon-Chancellor of NASA, the Russian Sergei Prokopyev and the German Alexander Gerst – was to return to Earth in December a six-month mission. A Soyuz capsule attached to the station they use to return to Earth is designed for 200 days in space, which means that their stay in orbit can only be prolonged for prolonged periods.

Flight controllers could operate the station without anyone on board in the case The Russian investigation is continuing next year, but NASA's administrator, Jim Bridenstine, announced earlier this month that he was expecting Roscosmos to launch the next crew in December.

The Russian spacecraft Soyuz is currently the only vehicle to route crews to the space station. the withdrawal of the fleet of American space shuttles. Russia risks losing this monopoly with the arrival of Boeing's Dragon capsules and Starliner in SpaceX.

The failure of the launch of the crew has dealt a new blow to the Russian space program, victim of a series of missed satellite launches in recent years. The October 11 accident marked the first aborted launch of the Russian space program since 1983, when two Soviet cosmonauts were safely dropped and disembarked after an explosion on the launch pad.