Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Soyuz Launch of Proton-M carrier rocket postponed

The launch of a Russian Proton-M carrier rocket with a Dutch telecommunications satellite SES-4 (NSS-14) onboard was called off on Monday due to "technical problems", a spokesman for the Khrunichev State Research and Production Center said.

He said the new date for launch was being discussed. He did not elaborate on the cause of the delay.

The launch would have been the 70th commercial launch of a Proton carrier rocket since 1995 and the 10th launch of this type of carrier rocket this year.

The SES-4 satellite, built by U.S. company Space Systems/Loral for the Dutch operator Ses World Skies, is designed to provide various satellite services to customers in the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Latin America.


Russia has experienced a number of launch mishaps in the past 13 months, including the crash of a Meridian dual purpose satellite shortly after take-off last week.

That incident led the head of Russia's Roscosmos space agency to say the industry was "in crisis."

The rocket failures come on top of the loss of Phobos-Grunt, Russia's most ambitious planetary mission in decades.

It became stuck in Earth orbit after its launch in November and is expected to fall back to Earth in mid-January.


A Siberian resident miraculously escaped serious injury or even death when a fragment of a Russian communication satellite crashed through the roof of his house.

A Meridian satellite that was launched on Friday from the Plesetsk space center in northern Russia on board a Soyuz-2 carrier rocket crashed near the Siberian city of Tobolsk minutes after liftoff.

Eight satellite fragments were found in an area some 100 kilometers from the city of Novosibirsk.

One, a titanium ball of about five kilograms, fell on to the roof of a village house in the Ordyn district.

The house owner, Andrei Krivorukov, had gone out to the yard to fetch firewood minutes before the crash.

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