Russian rocket puts satellite into orbit, 1st since failure
MOSCOW — A Russian Soyuz rocket put a military satellite in orbit on Thursday, its first successful launch since a similar rocket failed earlier this month to deliver a crew to the International Space Station.
The Russian military said a Soyuz-2 booster rocket 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 into a sharp fall 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 linked the failure to an element jettisoning one of the rocket’s four side boosters from the main stage that apparently had been damaged during final assembly at the Russia-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.