Two astronauts are alive after dramatically aborting their voyage to the International Space Station when their Russian Soyuz rocket malfunctioned while it carried them into orbit at 4,970mph.
American Nick Hague and Russian Aleksey Ovchinin were forced to abort their mission on the cusp of space, at an altitude of approximately 50km (164,000ft).
They landed safely in Kazakhstan after a ‘ballistic re-entry’, during which they experienced forces of up to 7G.
Video footage from the launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome shows a large plume of smoke coming from the rocket at the moment it failed and footage from inside the capsule shows the two astronauts being violently shaken about.
The secondary booster rocket failed shortly after the rocket jettisoned its first four booster rockets in stage-one separation at 164,000ft above the Earth but before the rocket entered orbit.
That meant automatic escape procedures kicked in and pointed the capsule, that was designed in the 1960s, back to Earth.
Search and rescue teams were scrambled to the touchdown location as NASA revealed the descent meant the Russian-built Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft had to take 'a sharper angle of landing compared to normal'.
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The astronauts of the Soyuz MS-10 are said to have switched into 'ballistic descent mode' once they were notified of the second stage booster fault.
This means the core automatically separated from the faulty booster and turned back to Earth.
The rocket came in at a much sharper angle than normal, allowing the craft to head as quickly as possible to the ground.
It is believed the rocket was travelling at more than 8,000 miles per hour (12,800kph) during its descent.
The astronauts would have experienced G-force pressure as high as 7Gs.
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Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin, who watched the launch together with NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, tweeted that a panel has been set up to investigate the cause of the booster failure.
Thursday's failure was the first manned launch failure for the Russian space program since September 1983 when a Soyuz exploded on the launch pad.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov said all manned launches will be suspended pending an investigation into the cause of the failure. He added that Russia will fully share all relevant information with the U.S.
