The launch of a Russian Soyuz rocket with three people on board was aborted 20 seconds before its scheduled liftoff Thursday.
Russia’s Roscosmos space agency had planned to send three crew members to the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Officials say the crew is safe and the launch was aborted by an automatic safety system.
No cause was immediately given.
During a live stream of the launch, viewers heard “Launch!” from the control room and saw the main support mechanism moving away from the spacecraft. But the words, "automatic cancellation of the launch," followed shortly after.
The Soyuz rocket was to to carry NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson and cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky of Roscosmos and Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus to the ISS. NASA said the crew would be promptly extracted from their Soyuz capsule atop the rocket assembly at the launch pad.
In October 2018, another Soyuz rocket set for the ISS failed two minutes before liftoff.
The aborted flight is a blow to Russia, as the ISS is one of the last remaining areas of cooperation between Moscow and the West amid its war in Ukraine.
NASA and the other agencies collaborating on the ISS plan to continue operations until 2030.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
