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Russian Space Agency: Solar Launch Failed
A joint Russian-U.S. project to launch a solar sail space vehicle crashed back to Earth when the booster rocket's engine failed less than two minutes after takeoff, the Russian space agency said Wednesday. The Cosmos 1 vehicle was intended to show that a so-called solar sail can make a controlled flight. Solar sails, designed to be propelled by pressure from sunlight, are envisioned as a potential means for achieving interstellar flight, allowing such spacecraft to gradually build up great velocity and cover large distances. But the Volna booster rocket failed 83 seconds after its launch from a Russian nuclear submarine in the northern Barents Sea just before midnight Tuesday in Moscow, the Russian space agency said. Remind me again why they were using a sub to launch?
It's dead, Jim. The Russian Defense Ministry launched a search for debris from the booster and the vehicle, he said. U.S. scientists had said earlier that they possibly had detected signals from the world's first solar sail spacecraft but cautioned that it could take hours or days to figure out exactly where the $4 million Cosmos 1 was. The signals were picked up late Tuesday after an all-day search for the spacecraft, which had suddenly stopped communicating after its launch, they said. "It's good news because we are in orbit â very likely in orbit," Bruce Murray, a co-founder of The Planetary Society, which organized the mission, said before the Russian space agency's announcement. Wait, maybe it's alive! A government panel will investigate possible reasons behind the failure of the three-stage rocket's first-stage engine, Davidenko said Nope, it's dead. Posted by: Spot 2005-06-22 |
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