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Some of Soyuz carrier rocket wreckage found in Kazakh steppe — source

The search for the remaining fragments of the rocket will continue on October 12

MOSCOW, October 11./TASS/. Some of Soyuz-FG carrier rocket’s wreckage has been found in the Kazakh steppe. Search for the remaining wreckage will continue in the morning, a source from the Baikonur Cosmodrome has told TASS.

"The search for the remaining fragments of the rocket will continue on Friday morning," the source said. According to him, "the found wreckage as well as telemetry data of the carrier rocket will be added to the materials to be studied by the commission looking into what caused the incident," the source added.

The trajectory of Baikonur liftoffs is calculated so that rocket stages and even its wreckage in case of an abortive launch fall in a drop area where they cannot cause destruction on the ground, the source said.

A Soyuz-FG carrier rocket with the manned Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday at 11:40 am (Moscow time). On board the spacecraft were Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin (the commander of the Soyuz MS-10) and NASA astronaut Nick Hague.

Shortly after liftoff, the Soyuz’s booster malfunctioned, forcing the crew to abort the mission and make a ballistic descent, ultimately landing in the Kazakh steppe. Rescuers evacuated the cosmonauts from the descent capsule. This is the first such incident in the past 35 years.