A Soyuz crew launch suffers a rare abort seconds before liftoff

Enlarge / Within minutes of Thursday's scrub, technicians were on the pad in Baikonur with the fully fueled rocket. (credit: NASA TV)

On Thursday a crew of three people was due to launch on a Soyuz rocket, bound for the International Space Station.

However, the launch scrubbed at about 20 seconds before the planned liftoff time, just before the sequence to ignite the rocket's engines was initiated, due to unspecified issues. Shortly after the abort, there were unconfirmed reports of an issue with the ground systems supporting the Soyuz rocket.

The three people inside the Soyuz spacecraft, on top of the rocket, were NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus. This Soyuz MS-25 mission had been planned for a liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, at 13:21 UTC (6:21 pm local time in Baikonur).