MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian Soyuz rocket has put a military satellite in orbit, its first successful launch since a similar rocket recently failed 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 northern Russia Thursday.
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 Russia had suspended all Soyuz launches pending a probe.
Investigators have linked the failure to an element jettisoning one of its four side boosters from the main stage that apparently had been damaged during the rocket's final assembly on the cosmodrome.
