New Russian space station flight planned for spring

The head of Russia's space agency said on Friday that two astronauts who survived the mid-air failure of a Russian rocket would fly again and would provisionally travel to the International Space Station (ISS) in spring of next year.

Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, was speaking a day after Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin and American Nick Hague made a dramatic emergency landing in Kazakhstan after the failure of the Soyuz rocket carrying them to the orbital ISS.

Rogozin on Friday posted a picture on Twitter of himself sat next to the two astronauts and said they had now arrived in Moscow.