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MOSCOW:
A Russian rocket carrying a US telecommunications satellite plunged into the
Pacific Ocean on Friday only moments after being launched from a mobile sea
platform in Moscow's latest space failure.
The
rocket may have veered off course from the moment of take-off because of heavy
waves battering the former northern seas oil platform, initial reports said.
The
Intelsat-27's loss means the giant Boeing aerospace corporation would for now
be unable to fit the final piece of a constellation mean to provide TV feeds
across Europe and the United States.
"There
was an accident during the Zenit rocket launch," a source at the Energia
corporation that makes the Zenit-3SL rocket used to lift up Intelsat satellites
told AFP.
"The
rocket fell into the Pacific Ocean."
Officials
said no one was hurt on the huge Odyssey platform that was once stationed off
the oil-rich coast of Norway before being tugged to the Pacific by an
international consortium called Sea Launch.
Energia
chief Vitaly Lopota said the Russian rocket's engine appeared to fail less than
a minute after the evening take-off but the reason was still unknown reason.
"We
had an abnormal situation -- the emergency shutdown of the first stage
engine," Lopota told the state RIA Novosti news agency.
"It
happened 50 seconds into the flight. We are now looking into what
happened."
Several
Russian media reports said the platform itself was unstable at the time of the
launch because of heavy weather.
Sources
said the Zenit had purposefully steered itself as far away from the Odyssey as
possible -- instead of going straight up -- because the engines detected a
problem and were programmed to save the ground crew.
"The
rockets detected an abnormal situation linked to platform instability from the
very start, and then switched the engines over (to operations) aimed at
steering the rocket away from the platform," a space industry source told
the Interfax news agency.
Sea
Launch has been using the deep-sea platform to perform commercial operations
since 1999. There had been only two complete failures out of the 34 missions
conducted prior to Friday's launch.
But
analysts said Sea Launch -- having emerged from bankruptcy protection in
October 2010 after years of financial difficulties -- will be keen to prove that
the accident was an anomaly that should not affect future launches.
"This
accident is very unpleasant for Sea Launch, which only recently started to
repair its reputation on the commercial space services market," said
Moscow's Space News magazine editor Igor Marinin.
Russia's
space programme is now especially closely watched because it provides the
world's only manned link to the International Space Station (ISS).
The
country's space programme also leads the world in the number of commercial
launches and is used by other nations to put up both private and military
satellites.
The
Roscosmos space agency -- a direct descendent of Moscow's once-proud Soviet
programme that competed against NASA at the height of the Cold War -- has been
beset by a string of accidents in the past two years that prompted sackings at
the top of command.
Russia's
most recent setback came in November when it temporarily lost contact with all
its non-military satellites as well as the space station because of a vital
cable cut.
Other
high-profile accidents included the loss of a highly-publicised Mars probe in
the Earth's orbit and the loss of a cargo vessel taking up supplies to the ISS.
That
August 2011 incident caused delays to a string of manned missions and renewed
Moscow's attention on finding an eventual replacement to the workhorse Soyuz
rocket.
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