KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida — The head of the Russian space agency says the American and Russian crew members who made an emergency landing after a failed launch Thursday in Kazakhstan will fly next spring.

  • Soyuz launch from Kazakhstan aborted 2 minutes after liftoff
  • Rocket was carrying American, Russian to space station
  • Suspension of Russian launches adds pressure on NASA

Russia has suspended all manned spaceflight during their investigation into the mishap, which forced Roscosmos to abort the launch of the Soyuz rocket.

Just two minutes after launch Thursday, an issue was detected with the second stage booster, leading to an abort of the crew module, which contained NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin. 

During the "ballistic landing," they endured G-forces as they made an emergency landing. They are in good condition, according to NASA.

Now, the pressure is mounting on NASA to return humans to space from Florida's Space Coast.

"It's a hostile environment. It takes a lot of energy to get up there. It's a challenge," said Dale Ketcham with Space Florida.

After the retirement of the space shuttle program, NASA started buying seats on Soyuz rockets to get to the International Space Station. NASA has since contracted both SpaceX and Boeing to start launching Americans to space. 

But technical setbacks have forced delays. The earliest human launch from the U.S. is now set for June 2019.

Even if Congress appropriated more money to those companies, it most likely wouldn't change the timetable.

"You don't want to rush it, because then you get into problems," Ketcham said. "It's just the nature of doing business in space."

As NASA and its Russian counterparts investigate what went wrong with the Soyuz booster, they now have to look out for the three remaining crew members on board the ISS.

"We planned to do a couple of spacewalks over the next two weeks," NASA ISS Operations Integration Manager Kenny Todd said. "We'll be looking hard at that since now, one of our EVA spacewalkers is still on the ground."

An escape pod for the three crew members at the ISS is useable until January. If Russia hasn't figured out its problem by then, the ISS may have to be operated remotely with no crew aboard.