Today’s Soyuz MS-10, with one American and one Russian cosmonaut suffered a booster failure and the spacecraft returned to the ground on a ballistic trajectory.
If the spacecraft reached above the Karmen line then its the first American sub-orbital flight since the 60’s.
No idea if the escape tower was used.
I just watched a vid of the launch and the escape tower definitely, per person announcing and visually on video, ejected just prior to the failure sequence.
Saw somewhere that the astronauts probably experienced around 20G’s off/on due to the altered/steep entry. Damn! It’s why they train so hard 
When they landed, their first priority was to change their space pants…
A close call! No astronaut has died since Columbia disintegrated in 2003. Let’s keep the streak going!
Link?
That’s a lot of Gs. Is that more than astronauts normally experience? I wonder if they were injured.
There are many copies of the same footage on Youtube. On this one the “escape tower separation” is at 3:49. Looks to me like there’s more than just the escape tower falling off of the rocket, but I don’t know how it normally looks.
Video switches to CGI shortly after, and it’s disconcerting/amusing to see the CGI rocket continue normally even as the voices in the background announce “failure of the booster.”
Nobody died, so time for a laugh.
This event makes me think of XKCD’s “US Space Team’s Up Goer Five” poster, specifically the note on the main engines:
Yes quite a lot more. But not for very long durations. IIRC a Soyuz reentering from orbit under normal aerodynamic reentry profile peaks at 5g, if there’s a problem with that it will go ballistic and a “normal” ballistic entry peaks between 8 and 10 g.
Aborts involve extremely violent maneuvers and then you don’t get the luxury of a long arc trajectory. You want to get the hell away from the big explodey thing then you want to get down quickly.
9-10 g are something the latest modern high-performance fighter jets pull. Both crewmen came from fighters, so I suspect the g forces were unpleasent due to being unwelcome but nothing either have not endured before.
I bet those brown stains will be on the upholstery for a long time. 
I know that would have scared the crap out of me.
Soyuz capsules are discarded after one use anyways, right?
I would guess that they cannabilise them for parts. Seats seem like something they might reuse.
They are positioned pretty much on their backs in the capsule, so their G tolerance is likely much higher than in a conventional fighter aircraft in which they are seated pretty much upright (ISTR the F-16 seat leans the pilot back about 30 degrees to reduce their total vertical height).
Popular Mechanics article says:
"For example, during the 2008 ballistic reentry of Soyuz TMA-1, astronauts endured an 8G gravity load as opposed to the 6Gs they experience during a controlled re-entry. The trip sent South Korean astronaut Yi So-yeon to the hospital with injuries to her neck muscles and a bruised spinal column.
“Today’s descent doesn’t seem to have been as violent as the 2008 incidents. According to a discussion between mission control and the space station, the astronauts experienced between 6 and 7Gs.”
The Soyuz T-10-1 capsule was used again on Soyuz T-15.
A mysterious hole in a Russian ferry craft just recently and now the 1st ever Soyuz launch fail.
Hmmmm…