Russian rocket satellite puts into orbit, first since failure

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

The Russian military said Soyuz-2 rocket booster lifted off from the Plesetsk launch 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 back to Earth. The crew landed safely, but the Russian space agency Roscosmos had suspended all Soyuz launches until Thursday, pending a probe.

The official panel is yet to produce its formal verdict, but investigators have reportedly been in a state of disrepair in the production of nuclear energy. .

Soyuz launches before launching a crew to the space station. No date for the crew, but it is expected in early December.

The current space crew station – 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. A Soyuz capsule attached to the station that they use to be back to Earth is designed for 200 days in space.

Flight controllers could operate the station in the field of research, but NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has said that this is the future.

The Russian Soyuz spacecraft is currently only for the crew of the space station following the U.S. space shuttle fleet. Russia stands to lose that monopoly with the arrival of SpaceX's Dragon and Boeing Starliner crew capsules.

The crew launch failure dealt with another blow to the Russian space program, which has been dogged by a string of failed satellite launches in recent years. The Oct. 11 accident marked the first aborted manned launch for the Russian space program since 1983, when two Soviet cosmonauts jettisoned and landed safely after a launch pad explosion.