Astronauts may have to temporarily abandon the International Space Station after the crash of a Russian supply rocket, officials said.
The Soyuz rocket carrying the Progress 44 supply ship, expected to deliver 3 tons of supplies to the orbiting lab's six-man crew, crashed in eastern Russia after a booster rocket failure just minutes after launch.
Russia's Federal Space Agency uses similar versions of its Soyuz rocket to launch both unmanned cargo vehicles and its crewed space capsules, SPACE.com reported Monday.
Safety concerns over the Soyuz rocket could force the space station to fly unmanned beginning in November, officials said.
"Logistically, we can support [operations] almost forever, but eventually if we don't see the Soyuz spacecraft, we'll probably going to unmanned ops before the end of the year," Michael Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager, told Spaceflight Now.
The Russian space agency is investigating the cause of the crash.
"We will understand, to our satisfaction, the anomaly, what is believed to be the cause and how they resolved it," Suffredini said. "If we're not happy, we won't put our astronauts on the Soyuz."
Russia is expected to release preliminary findings this week and set tentative dates for resuming Soyuz launches.
