This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A Russian-American space crew have been forced to make an emergency landing in Kazakhstan after their Soyuz rocket suffered a failure shortly after launching from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in one of the most serious space incidents in recent years.

The launch began as a routine affair. Missions bound for the International Space Station (ISS) have been conducted every few months for the past 20 years. But 119 seconds into Thursday’s flight, mission controllers on the Nasa broadcast began to speak of a failure.

Shaky footage from the capsule’s cabin seen during the live broadcast appeared to show objects floating mid-launch. The crew told mission control they felt weightless, an indication of a problem during that stage of the flight.

Agitated voices flooding the radio link between mission control and the capsule could be heard on the Nasa broadcast. Details and the exact sequence of events remain unclear, but shortly afterwards the crew initiated an abort and ejected their capsule from the rocket.

Judging by the time at which the failure took place, it involved separation of the rocket’s second stage – just before the ship would have ignited the third stage for its final kick to exit the atmosphere.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest American astronaut Nick Hague (L) speaks to Roscosmos’s director Dmitry Rogozin after the emergency landing. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

A commentator on Nasa’s live broadcast later said that rescue teams had reached the capsule’s landing site and the two-person crew were in “good condition”. The Russian Alexey Ovchinin and the American Nick Hague had already left the capsule when rescue teams arrived.

Nasa described the emergency abort as a “ballistic landing”, meaning the crew’s spaceship did not achieve the speed necessary to achieve orbit around the Earth and instead fell back to the ground.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The rocket with the Soyuz spacecraft carrying Alexey Ovchinin and Nick Hague in flight before the mission was aborted. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov/EPA

Russia’s space programme has experienced an embarrassing series of launch failures since 2010, when serious quality control and other systemic issues became apparent. However, this is the first time in the history of the ISS programme that a manned Soyuz mission has failed.

What happens next will have significant repercussions for both the ISS programme and the US-Russia space partnership. Standard practice is to ground a rocket after failure until the cause is identified and addressed.

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Soyuz is currently the only rocket capable of sending astronauts to the space station, and US companies such as Boeing and SpaceX will be unlikely to be ready to take astronauts into space until sometime next year.

A former Russian cosmonaut, Mikhail Kornienko, was quoted by the Russian news outlet Zvezda as saying the crew probably experienced forces up to five times that of normal Earth gravity. Typical re-entry is about four times that force.

The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, is forming a committee to investigate the incident but was not holding press conference on Thursday. Nasa has continued with rolling coverage on its web channel but is dependent on information from Moscow.