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

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

The Russian army announced that a Soyuz-2 booster rocket had been launched from the Plesetsk launch pad in northwestern Russia.

A Soyuz-FG rocket carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Alexei Ovchinin of Roscosmos failed two minutes after the flight began on October 11, returning his emergency capsule to Earth. The crew landed unhindered, but the Russian space agency Roscosmos had suspended all Soyuz launches until Thursday, pending an investigation.

The official panel has not yet made its formal verdict, but investigators reportedly linked this failure to an item that was dropping one of the four side rocker boosters of the main stage, apparently damaged during final assembly at the Baikonur cosmodrome rented by Russia to Kazakhstan.

Russian space authorities plan to launch two more unmanned Soyuz launches before bringing a crew to the space station. No date for the launch of the crew has yet been set, but it is scheduled for early December.

The current crew of the space station – Serena Aunon-Chancellor of NASA, Russian Sergei Prokopyev and German Alexander Gerst – was to return to Earth in December after 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 extended briefly.

The flight controllers could operate the station without anyone on board in case the Russian investigation would continue, but NASA's administrator, Jim Bridenstine, announced earlier this month that "no one is on board". he expects Roscosmos to launch the next crew in December.

The Russian space shuttle Soyuz is currently the only vehicle to bring crews to the space station after the withdrawal of the US space shuttle fleet. Russia risks losing this monopoly with the arrival of SpaceX's Dragon capsules and Boeing's Starliner.

The failure of the crew launch was a further blow to the Russian space program, which has been the victim of a series of failed satellite launches in recent years. The crash of 11 October marked the first aborted launch of the Russian space program since 1983, when two Soviet cosmonauts were dropped and landed safely after a launching ramp exploded.