Aleksey Nikolayevich Ovchinin is a Russian Air Force Major and cosmonaut, who was selected in 2006. Ovchinin made his first spaceflight in 2016, and was assigned as commander of Soyuz MS-10 in 2018.

Soyuz MS-10 was a crewed Soyuz MS spaceflight that aborted shortly after launch on 11 October 2018 due to a failure of the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle boosters. MS-10 was the 139th flight of a Soyuz spacecraft. It was intended to transport two members of the Expedition 57 crew to the International Space Station. A few minutes after liftoff, the craft went into contingency abort due to a booster failure and had to return to Earth. By the time the contingency abort was declared, the launch escape system (LES) tower had already been ejected and the capsule was pulled away from the rocket using the solid rocket jettison motors on the capsule fairing. Both crew members, Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague, were recovered in good health. The MS-10 flight abort was the first instance of a Russian crewed booster accident in 35 years, since Soyuz T-10-1 exploded on the launch pad in September 1983. On 1 November 2018, Russian scientists released a video recording of the mission.