Air Force Academy Graduate Survives Aborted Soyuz Mission

KAZAKHSTAN (CBS4)- A NASA astronaut who graduated from the Air Force Academy, is recuperating after surviving an emergency landing shortly after launching for the International Space Station.

Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin are in what NASA director Jim Bridenstine described as "good condition" after surviving an emergency landing after a booster failure on a Russian Soyuz rocket Thursday.

The rocket was transporting Hague and Ovchinin from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a six-month stay on the International Space Station.

NASA currently depends on Russian Soyuz launch systems to ferry crew members to the station.

NASA and Roscosmos said search-and-rescue teams responded quickly to retrieve the crew members, whose spacecraft parachuted to Earth in an emergency landing in Kazakhstan.

Dramatic footage showed the capsule carrying the crew thumping down in a plume of dust, minutes after it launched.

The rocket had lifted off at 4:40 a.m. ET on a journey that was expected to involve four orbits of the Earth and take six hours.