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| Russian Space Agency: Solar Launch Failed | |
| 2005-06-22 | |
| 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 — 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 |
| #6 Also, the missile in question is only meant to put stuff onto ballistic trajectories. It can bomb New York just fine. The satellite had an integrated "kick stage" meant to take it the rest of the way into LEO, but that appears to be the part that malfunctioned. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-06-22 13:45 |
| #5 Iridium was first designed to use the MX missiles being decomissioned as part of START. When statistics were run on its targeting and reliblity new rockets had to be quickly be found. Pegasus was the first choice but it's payload size kept getting smaller. Eventually regular boosters from US, USSR and China (long march) were used.... Needless to say at a much much higher cost. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2005-06-22 10:12 |
| #4 Pity. Regardless of who [fails to] launch it, science projects like this are international. Cheaderhead: That's why they had 3-4 targetted at each of our silos and cities. |
| Posted by: Jackal 2005-06-22 10:02 |
| #3 From the report I saw the booster failed after 83 seconds. And they originally built these things to lob nucs at us???????? |
| Posted by: Cheaderhead 2005-06-22 09:35 |
| #2 Remind me again why they were using a sub to launch? It saves them the trouble of building a launch site on land; the missile in question is designed for launch from the sea; finally, it lets the western sponsor say they're using the "former" Russian domesday weapon for something useful while the Russians get to do a launch test of one of their missiles/subs at Western expense. I *thought* they had a doppler signal from the satellite last night, before the apogee kick motor kicked in, which was on the satellite and not the launcher. So that should hint at where the problem started. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-06-22 09:08 |
| #1 Now a'hold up there - how come a'certain of the MSM have arrrteeekles describing dem dat Solar Sail as operational and cabable of a'orbitin, with the Russki engine probs a minutae glitch! |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2005-06-22 08:41 |