A spacewalk to inspect a hole in the manned Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft’s hull scheduled for mid-November has been cancelled due to the abortive launch of the Soyuz-FG carrier rocket, Roscosmos Executive Director for Manned Programs Sergei Krikalyov said on Friday.

"The spacewalk was planned for mid-November. Alexei Ovchinin and Sergei Prokopyev were expected to make the spacewalk together. There will be no spacewalk on November 15. We will see, if we manage to make the shift intervals long enough, we will try to make this spacewalk with one of the next crews. The flight program will now be on hold and revised," Krikalyov said.

A Soyuz-FG carrier rocket with a manned Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft blasted off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome to the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday, at 11:40 a.m. 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 its smooth liftoff, the Soyuz’s booster malfunctioned between the first and second stages of separating, whereupon the crew was forced to abort the flight and switch to ballistic descent. The manned Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft ended up landing in the Kazakh steppe

The press office of Russia’s Central Military District reported that rescuers had recovered the crew from the descent capsule. Later, the crewmembers were examined and found to be in good condition. After their medical check-up in the town of Baikonur, the astronauts were transported to Moscow.

This is the first emergency landing with this type of carrier rocket over the past 35 years.