Russia’s Proton rockets may blast off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmodrome again.
Photo: Dmitry Lebedev
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Proton to Blast Off from Baikonur
Russia’s Proton rockets may blast off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmodrome again. But Moscow and Astana are yet to agree on the compensation due for Proton’s crash of September 6.
Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Karim Masimov inked yesterday a ruling to lift the embargo on Proton launches from Baikonur cosmodrome from October 26. This move of Kazakhstan means the next satellite launch by Proton will go ahead as scheduled. The rocket will blast off with three GLONASS-M navigation satellites; the launch had been planned for October 25, but Kazakhstan requested to shelve it because of the National Holiday celebrated in the country that day.
Kazakhstan banned Proton launches September 6, following the failure of Proton-M rocket carrying Japan’s JCSat-11 satellite. Then, the wreckage of the rocket and the satellite, along with remains of the toxic fuel, fell somewhat 40 kilometers to the south-west of Jezkazgan-town of the Karagandinsky district of Kazakhstan.
In early October, Anatoly Perminov, who is the chief of Federal Space Agency, Roskosmos, presented to Kazakhstan the conclusion of Russia’s commission on the causes of accident. “The explosive bolts didn’t work, which resulted in the emergency switch-off of the first-stage engine,” Perminov explained, pointing out they elaborated methods to prevent the failure in future.
But Kazakhstan didn’t rush to lift the ban straight after Perminov’s statement, linking it to the compensation amount, which they calculated at 7.327 billion tenge and which Russia views overestimated.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 25, 2007
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