Russia said on Thursday the launch of a Soyuz rocket failed last month due to a sensor that was damaged during assembly but insisted that the spacecraft remains reliable.
Video: Soyuz MS-10 onboard camera view
Russia, the only country able to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station, suspended all launches after a Soviet-designed Soyuz rocket failed on October 11 just minutes after blast-off -- the first such incident in the history of post-Soviet space travel.
The head of the commission that probed the accident, said the flight was aborted because part of a sensor that indicates the separation of the stages of the rocket was damaged during assembly at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
"The cause of a non-standard separation" was a "deformation" of a part during assembly, Skorobogatov told a news conference at Russia's mission control outside Moscow.
He said the deformation caused a booster on the first stage to malfunction and collide with a fuel tank which "led to the loss of stabilisation" and triggered an emergency landing.
A video recorded by a Soyuz camera and published by the Russian space agency showed the rocket rapidly changing direction and spinning around after one of the four boosters failed to separate in synch with the others.
During the aborted launch, Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin and US astronaut Nick Hague made an emergency landing and escaped unharmed.
The Russian space agency said on Wednesday it hoped to launch a new crew for the International Space Station on December 3.
On the rocket destined for the ISS will be Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques, and NASA's Anne McClain.
The trio had originally been scheduled to blast off on December 20, but had their trip brought forward after the failed October 11 launch.
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