Buran: Russia starts ambitious super-heavy space rocket project

On the 25th anniversary of the historic flight of the Soviet space shuttle Buran, Russia's Roscosmos space agency has formed a working group to prepare "within weeks" a roadmap for the revival of the Energia super-heavy booster rocket.

The group led by Oleg Ostapenko, the new head of Roscosmos Federal Space Agency, is set to draw up proposals on the design of a super-heavy launch vehicle capable of delivering up to 100 tonnes of payload to the baseline orbit, former Soviet minister of general machine building, Oleg Baklanov, said on Friday.

"You have assumed the responsibility and dared to head the group, which is supposed to find an answer to the question how we can regain the position we demonstrated to the world with the launch of a 100-tonne spacecraft [Buran in 1988] within a few weeks," the ex-minister told Ostapenko at the event dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the flight of the Buran shuttle spacecraft.

The new carrier rocket Angara is set to become the base for the ambitious project that could bring Russia back to its heyday of space exploration. It could be launched from the Vostochny Cosmodrome which is now being constructed in Russia's Far East, and will replace Kazakhstan's Baikonur as Russia's main launchpad.

The 1988 launch of the Energia super-heavy rocket carrying the Buran space shuttle proved the rocket was capable of delivering 100 tonnes into orbit.

That was five times more than the Proton-M rocket with a 20-tonne payload, thus making it the most powerful Soviet/Russian booster rocket ever developed.

As the International Space Station is scheduled to be taken out of service around 2020, ex-minister Baklanov explained that such a powerful rocket would allow the construction of a new orbital station "larger in its weight and dimensions."

Also, a booster similar to the Soviet Energia would be indispensable for "exploring outer space in a wise manner, working in shifts on Mars, the Moon and so on," he added.

At the same media conference, president of the Energia Rocket and Space Corporation Vitaly Lopota announced that Russia will soon need super-heavy rockets to create a shield against possible future space weapons - which means deploying into orbit massive communications satellites and electronic warfare platforms.

India's Ambitious MARS Mission hits a major snag

India's mission to Mars has hit a snag, after a planned engine burn failed to raise the spacecraft's orbit around Earth by the intended amount.

The problem occurred during a manoeuvre designed to boost the craft's maximum distance from 71,623km to 100,000km.

A problem with the liquid fuel thruster caused the 1,350kg vehicle to fall short of the mark.

But the head of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) said the spacecraft remained "healthy".

As a solution, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) - known informally as Mangalyaan, or Mars-craft - will be commanded to execute an additional thruster firing at 05:00 IST on Tuesday (23:30 GMT on Monday) to make up for the shortfall.

However, independent experts cont acted by the BBC said they were puzzled by Isro's working hypothesis for the failure.

Instead of flying directly to Mars, the probe is scheduled to orbit Earth until the end of the month, building up the necessary velocity to break free from our planet's gravitational pull.

This was the fourth in a series of five engine burns known as "midnight manoeuvres" because several constraints require that they are carried out in the early hours of the morning.

Speaking to Pallava Bagla, science editor at Indian broadcasting network NDTV, Isro's chairman K Radhakrishnan said: "The spacecraft is healthy and it encountered a problem when a specific redundancy test was being conducted and it failed to reach the desired velocity it was to achieve."

In that redundancy test, two coils in the liquid engine were supposed to be energised simultaneously.

"When you are going so far away, if one thing fails, you want to have a standby option. Everything is almost doubled up on the satellite, which is why they were not able to carry so much scientific equipment," Mr Bagla explained.