Molniya Launcher Hits Tyumen Bog
Four-stage launcher Molnia-M with a military satellite on board lifted off from Plesetsk spaceport, the Arkhangelsk Region, Tuesday, 4:49 a.m. MSK. On failed separation of the 2nd stage, the package of the 3rd and the 4th stages fell to Tyumen bog instead of hitting the near-earth orbit.
Molniya-M launcher blasts off from Plesetsk spaceport from February 1970. The take-off number reached 223, including 8 abnormal situations. But the breakdown similar to the yesterday’s one happened first time in 35 years. So far, the launcher has never failed in time of the first three stages operation. In seven other cases, the satellites were delivered to the orbits, though other than the target ones, following the failure of the fourth upper stage rocket.
Molniya-M was to deliver June 21 an upgraded military communication satellite - Moliya-3K - to an elliptical orbit of the max. altitude of 40,000 km. The satellite was to hit the orbit in 54 minutes after the start that was quite normal. The crash happened in the fifth minute, when Molnia was passing the Tyumen Region’s Uvat area. Separation of the 2nd stage was not confirmed and communication link broke. As a result, the emergency stop for the third-stage engines followed and the set of the third and the upper stages fell somewhere 400 km from Uvat, said Anatoly Perminov, head of the Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos). But according to the emergency ministry’s official, the launcher might have fallen not in the Tyumen Region, but somewhere in the Omsk or even the Tomsk Region. “Although the pieces might have fallen to bog, we will go on searching,” the official said.
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All the Article in Russian as of June 22, 2005
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