Russia's beleaguered space industry suffered another setback yesterday when officials suspended launches of a rocket system that had been used at the weekend in a failed attempt to put a European polar monitoring satellite into orbit.
| Tends to happen when your rockets blow up. |
State television said yesterday that Russia's space agency would not launch another Rokot missile until it had found out why a rocket crashed into the Atlantic. It was carrying the European Space Agency's Cryosat satellite, which monitors depletion of the polar ice-cap and gives vital clues on climate change. The £93m satellite was destroyed in the crash.
The Rokot, a converted SS19 intercontinental ballistic missile, took off from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia at 3pm on Saturday. The ESA said yesterday that the onboard computer had not turned off the rocket's booster early enough, thus burning up all the fuel, and prompting the rocket to crash. The ESA said Yuri Bakhvalov, head of the Russian arm of the project, confirmed a faulty launch sequence had caused the crash.
The Cryosat was to spend three years monitoring the thin ice sheets covering the polar seas and the miles-thick ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Russian officials stressed that six previous launches of the Rokot had been successful. But the crash capped a bad week for the Russian space industry, with the failure of another joint Esa project on Friday. Russian officials admitted they were unable to locate a collapsible craft launched from a nuclear submarine. |
