US astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin landed safely on Thursday and rescue crews who raced to locate them on the Kazakh steppe quickly linked up with them, according to the US space agency NASA and Russia's space agency Roscosmos. The capsule took 34 minutes to reach the ground after it separated from the faulty rocket, NASA said. Footage from inside the Soyuz capsule showed the pair being shaken around at the moment the failure occurred, with their arms and legs flailing. Thursday's accident was the first serious launch problem experienced by a manned Soyuz space mission since 1983, when a crew narrowly escaped before an explosion on the launchpad. A Russian space industry source was cited by the Interfax news agency as saying that there was enough food onboard the space station to last until April of next year.

Source: Otago Daily Times October 11, 2018 20:12 UTC