Russian Zenit Launch Failure: 'Faulty Ukrainian Parts' Blamed

The Sea Launch consortium, led by Energia, launched the Zenit rocket from its floating platform Odyssey at an equatorial launch site in international waters in the Pacific Ocean. 

The rocket fell into the sea not far from the Odyssey, which was not damaged in the failed launch, a Russian space industry source reported.

The crash of a Russian Zenit-3SL rocket earlier this month was caused by defective components manufactured in Ukraine, Ivan Kharchenko, first deputy head of the Russian government's military-industrial commission, said on Tuesday.

The Zenit-3SL, carrying an Intelsat-27 (IS-27) telecoms satellite, crashed into the Pacific Ocean shortly after launch on February 1, following an emergency shutdown of its first-stage engine.

A report presented by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev concluded that "the accident was caused by defective blocks manufactured in Ukraine," Kharchenko said, adding that "there was nothing wrong with the Russian-made equipment."

Rogozin presented his report to Medvedev on February 15, according to Kharchenko.

Russian space corporation RKK Energia head Vitaly Lopota said at the time of the crash that the malfunction had occurred around 50 seconds into the flight.

The Sea Launch consortium, led by Energia, launched the Zenit rocket from its floating platform Odyssey at an equatorial launch site in international waters in the Pacific Ocean. The rocket fell into the sea not far from the Odyssey, which was not damaged in the failed launch, a Russian space industry source told RIA Novosti.

The Zenit-3SL integrated launch vehicle is a liquid-propellant rocket consisting of three stages and a payload unit. The first stage is powered by the RD-171M engine designed by Russia's NPO Energomash rocket engine design bureau. The RD-171M is one of the most powerful rocket engines in the world, producing 740,000 kilograms of thrust at liftoff.

Another Zenit 3SL Sea Launch Failure

Once the platform is ballasted to a depth of 22 m, the launch vehicle hangar is opened and the Zenit 3SL is mechanically moved to a vertical position. 

The launch platform crew members then evacuate to the command ship which steams about five kilometers away. 

Rocket stages are then remotely commanded to load propellants. 

The final launch sequence is then completed and launch takes place.

Sea Launch is currently a Russian spacecraft launch service that uses a mobile seagoing platform for direct equatorial launches of commercial payloads on Zenit 3SL rockets.

Since its inception there have been 31 launches, including three failures and one partial failure. The sea-based system operates out of Long Beach, California, but its launches take place from an equatorial spot in the Pacific Ocean. This location allows a minimal energy ascent-to-orbit for geostationary-bound satellites.

Sea Launch was originally established in 1995 as a consortium of four companies from Norway, Russia, Ukraine and the United States. The program was managed by Boeing with personnel participation from the other shareholders.

Its first launch took place in March 1999. Almost all of Sea Launch's commercial payloads have been communications satellites intended for geostationary transfer orbit. The launch vehicle and its payload are assembled in Long Beach on a specially outfitted ship, the "Sea Launch Commander."

Once assembled the vehicle is positioned on top of a self-propelled converted oil platform, the "Ocean Odyssey." Both the command ship and the platform sail some 4,828 km to an equatorial position at 154 degrees West Longitude, where final pre-launch operations and launch take place.

The travel time to the site is about 11 days for the platform and about eight days for the command ship.

N-Korea's rocket crashes into sea

North Korea's much-anticipated rocket launch has ended in failure, splintering into pieces over the Yellow Sea soon after lift-off.

The reclusive communist state admitted in an announcement on state TV that a satellite launched hours earlier from the west coast failed to enter into orbit.

The US and South Korea also declared the launch a failure.

The Kwangmyongsong-3 satellite was fired from the Sohae Satellite Launching Station in Tongchang-ri, along the west coast, at 7.38am (11.38pm Thursday BST) but failed to reach orbit, the state-run Korean Central News Agency said.

"Scientists, technicians and experts are now looking into the cause of the failure," KCNA said.

US and South Korean officials said hours earlier that the rocket splintered into pieces about a minute after lift-off over the Yellow Sea, calling it a provocative failed test of missile technology.

In response to the launch, Washington announced it was suspending plans to contribute food aid to the North in exchange for a rollback of its nuclear programmes.

The US North American Aerospace Defence Command said it detected and tracked the launch of the rocket - which it called a missile - over the Yellow Sea; the first stage fell into the sea 100 miles west of Seoul, South Korea, while stages two and three failed.

"At no time were the missile or the resultant debris a threat," Norad said in a statement.

The US, Japan, Britain and other nations had been urging North Korea to cancel a launch seen as a covert test of the rocket technology also used to send a long-range missile to strike the US

North Korea refused to back down, saying the rocket would carry only a civilian satellite, touting it as a major technological achievement to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the country's founder, Kim Il Sung, on Sunday.

Damaged Russian Spaceship: Launch Delay for Next ISS Crew Uplift

A botched pressure test of a Russian space capsule slated to launch the next crew to the International Space Station has forced NASA and its partners to delay the planned liftoff for more than a month.

The Russian Soyuz spacecraft launch was originally slated for March 29, but now is targeted for no earlier than May 15, NASA's International Space Station program manager Mike Suffredini told reporters today (Feb. 2).

The Soyuz's crew capsule, one of three modules that make up the entire Soyuz TMA-04M vehicle, has been scrapped after an accident during testing caused it to spring a leak in one of its descent module's rocket thruster fuel tanks. Now Russia's main space contractor, RSC Energia, is readying the next spaceship on the line, though the issue will cause a lengthy delay.

"This particular event is very unfortunate, but you know this is a complicated business and things happen," Suffredini said. "To me this is not indicative of some overarching problem at the Energia corporation. I have every confidence that they'll figure out the cause of this and rectify it for the future."

Russia to postpone next manned space launches

Russia is set to pospone the next two manned launches for the International Space Station (ISS) for several weeks due to technical problems with the Soyuz spaceship, an industry source told Interfax Friday.

The source told Interfax that the Soyuz TMA-04M vessel had not withstood tests to its pressure chamber ahead of the planned mission on March 30 and the first flight would be postponed to mid-April or the first half of May.

"This re-entry capsule now cannot be used for manned spaceflight," the source said.

That mission would fly with the re-entry capsule that was due to go up on the next mission on May 30 and as a result that mission would also likely be postponed to the middle or end of June.

The re-entry capsule goes inside the spacecraft and is the portion that eventually returns the astronauts to Earth when the mission is over.

Russia now has sole reponsibility for taking US and other international astronauts to the ISS following the withdrawal of the US space shuttle but its own space programme has been hit by a string of problems in the last months.

Russian Phobos-Grunt Mars probe falls in Pacific Ocean

Doomed Russian Phobos-Grunt Mars probe that's been stuck in Earth orbit for two months has crashed down in the Pacific Ocean on late Sunday.

"Phobos-Grunt fragments have crashed down in the Pacific Ocean," Russia's Defense Ministry official Alexei Zolotukhin told RIA Novosti, adding that the fragments fell in 1,250 kilometers to the west of the island of Wellington.

The spacecraft fell at about 21:45 on Sunday Moscow time [17:45 GMT].

As of 20.15 Sunday, the spacecraft was moving in the near-Earth orbit with an altitude that varied between 113.8 km at perigee and 133.2 km at apogee, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.

Did US shoot Phobos-Grunt down? No!

Sometime this weekend, Phobos-Grunt will crash into the Indian Ocean.

The Russian space probe was supposed to return a sample from Mars's moon Phobos (hence the name – grunt means "ground" in Russian).

Unfortunately, after its launch on 9 November, the upper stages failed, and it remained stuck in low Earth orbit – so low that atmospheric drag will draw it back to Earth and destroy it.

It took more than a decade and some $163 million to build Phobos-Grunt, so it its inexplicable failure was understandably frustrating for the Russians.

In a bizarre interview, Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Russia's space agency, alluded to foul play: "We don't want to accuse anybody, but there are very powerful devices that can influence spacecraft now. The possibility they were used cannot be ruled out," he said, in The New York Times's translation.

He insinuated that the US was to blame: "The frequent failure of our space launches, which occur at a time when they are flying over the part of Earth not visible from Russia, where we do not see the spacecraft and do not receive telemetric information, are not clear to us."

The claim that Phobos-Grunt was shot down is absurd but that's not because it would be hard to do. If you can launch satellites, it is easier to destroy them, and to do so with deniability isn't much harder.

Had the US wanted to destroy Phobos-Grunt, it could have but it's hard to fathom why – not least of all because doing so would have messed with a couple of scientific missions piggy-backed onto the Russian probe: a Chinese Mars orbiter and an experiment run by the Planetary Society, an American space advocacy group co-founded by Carl Sagan.

More importantly, there is a global taboo on war in space. The US would not have broken it arbitrarily to destroy a scientific probe.

No country has ever (so far as is known in the unclassified literature) attacked another's satellite.

When China tested an anti-satellite weapon against one of its own satellites in 2007, it provoked an international outcry because it created more than 4000 new bits of debris, increasing by almost half the amount of trackable "space junk".

The US broke a de facto moratorium on space weapon testing in 2008, when a missile launched from a navy cruiser destroyed an American satellite, the first such test since 1985 (when an F-15-launched missile was the weapon of choice).

The US has by far the most invested in space. That gives it the most to lose. Military hawks talk about space as the "ultimate high ground."

This is silly, space is high ground, sure enough, and tremendously useful militarily but spacecraft are (and always will be) fragile, vulnerable things, unlike castles or forts built on normal, non-ultimate high grounds.

Popovkin's speculation is almost certainly incorrect and comes from a paranoid nation. I also suspect it was likely to be deliberate nationalist pandering, perhaps not meant to be taken seriously but there are two reasons why this is worrisome.

The first is that it's hard to prove he's wrong, so when the next, more militarily useful, spacecraft fails, the accusation can resurface. The other is that Popovkin, and the Soyuzes he controls, are the only way to get American astronauts to the International Space Station.

Russian Phobos Grunt Probe: Latest In-Orbit Images

Latest Phobos-Grunt true colour images with good colour rendition between solar panels and the body.

Report: Russia’s Phobos Grunt Probe to Fall to Earth January 15 - International Business Times

Russia's stranded Phobos Grunt spacecraft could fall to Earth on January 15, according to the spokesman of Russia's military space forces.

Spokesman Alexei Zolotukhin told Russian news agencies that fragments of Russia's stranded Mars probe Phobos-Grunt could fall to Earth on January 15.

"As of Wednesday morning, the fragments of Phobos-Grunt are expected to fall January 15, 2012. The final date could change due to external factors," said spokesman Alexei Zolotukhin.

In November, the military space forces" monitoring centre had predicted that the probewould fall to Earth in January or February.

Between 20 to 30 fragments of the Phobos Grunt spacecraft are expected to fall to Earth, but Russian space officials said the spacecraft's highly toxic fuel will burn up on entering the Earth's atmosphere.

Earlier, a Russian space official said that while the 13.5 ton probe, which is carrying highly toxic fuel, could also crash into the earth, it is impossible to predict the exact position of such an event.

"The crash area of any craft can only be estimated in the final 24 hours," said Vitaly Davydov, deputy head of Roscosmos in the first official acknowledgment on failed probe Davydov said. "Before then, saying what will fall and where is pointless."

Russia launched the Phobos-Grunt research probe to the Martian moon Phobos on Nov. 9, in an attempt to reinvigorate its interplanetary program which had not seen a successful mission since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Because of the failed probe, Davydov said that in the future Russia may just focus on sending probes to the Earth's moon and researching on Mars in cooperation with its international partners.

It will be recalled that towards the end of 2010, Russia's already troubled space industry was further shaken by the failure of the Proton rocket sending a trio of GLONASS satellites, costing more than $138 million, to crash down into the ocean.

This was followed by the failed launch of the Rockot booster, which left a new-generation Geo-IK-2 military satellite in a useless orbit.

In August 2011 the agency again suffered the loss of the Ekspress-AM4 communications satellite and the unprecedented crash of a Progress cargo ship heading to the International Space Station.

Then came the Phobos-Grunt fiasco which is expected to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere next week

Another Russian Soyuz-2 Rocket Fails to reach Orbit

An unmanned Soyuz-2 rocket carrying a Russian communications satellite lifted off from Russia's Plesetsk space center at 7:08 a.m. EST (1208 GMT), but failed to reach orbit after a third-stage engine failure.

The rocket and its payload crashed in Siberia, according to the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

There was no immediate word about whether the Soyuz-2 failure will impact upcoming launches, including a Soyuz flight slated for Wednesday to put six Globalstar mobile communications satellites into orbit.

The engine on the Soyuz-2 rocket lost Friday is different than the one used on the rocket that launches space station cargo and crews, NASA said.

"This is unlikely to have any effect on operations to the International Space Station," said NASA spokesman Joshua Buck.

Russia Phobos-Grunt: Mars-bound Craft Loses Way Minutes After Launch

Adding to the country's list of space bungles, a Russian space craft designed to collect rock and dust samples from a Martian moon has flown of course just minutes after being launched.

The Russian space agency has since reported that the craft veered off course after an engine designed to keep it on track failed to start.

As a result of the engine failure the probe is reportedly stuck in Earth's orbit.

Russian engineers have since clarified that they have three days to correct the problem before the craft's batteries run out.

Codenamed "grunt" (soil in Russian) the craft was the agency's most ambitious mission in years. Grunt was designed to travel to and collect samples from a 27 km-wide "Phobos" moon orbiting Mars.

Scientists had hoped that the samples would help shed light on the mysterious moon's origin, with many believing it may be an asteroid caught in Mars orbit.

The mission was doubly important as the craft was carrying China's first Mars satellite. Weighing in at 115kg, the Yinghuo-1 was planned to ride with Grunt to Mars, releasing it into an observation orbit once it arrived.

A spokesman for the Russian Space Agency has since clarified that scientists are working to fix grunt's engine failure and still hope to have the samples back on Earth within three year's time

Roscosmos to enhance control of Soyuz rocket engines' production

A special commission investigating the causes of the August 24 failed launch of Russia's Soyuz carrier rocket has recommended enhancing the control of the production of engines for Soyuz rockets, Russian space agency Roscosmos said.

A Soyuz rocket engine failure resulted in the loss of the Progress M-12M space freighter on August 24, the first loss of a Progress freighter in the history of Russia's space industry.

The freighter failed to separate from the rocket and fell in South Siberia's Altai Republic.

A clogged fuel supply pipe caused the engine failure, the commission discovered, describing the defect as "accidental," Roscosmos said.

However, the space agency said, the commission still recommended introducing additional control procedures to ensure that other similar engines do not have same defects.

The recommendation follows an order by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to review and improve control procedures in the space industry that came after the August 24 accident, another one is a series of misfortunes faced by Russia's space industry over the last nine months.

After the retirement of the U.S. shuttle fleet earlier this summer, Russian Soyuz spacecraft became the only way for astronauts to reach the ISS until at least the middle of the decade.

NASA is paying its Russian counterpart Roscosmos more than $1 billion for crew transport services over the next four years.

Amazon Spaceship fails on test flight

An unmanned spacecraft bankrolled by Amazon.com supremo Jeff Bezos has failed during a test flight.

The vehicle became unstable at 45,000 feet and ground controllers had to terminate it as a precaution. Additional details about what went wrong were not released.

"Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we're signed up for this to be hard," Amazon chief executive Mr Bezos wrote in a blog post.

Mr Bezos founded Blue Origin to develop a vertical take-off and landing rocketship that would fly passengers to suborbital space. It recently won money from Nasa to compete to go into orbit as a space taxi now that the space shuttle fleet is retired.

The mishap occurred during a test flight last week from Blue Origin's West Texas spaceport. The ultra-secretive company notified the Federal Aviation Administration about the launch and only acknowledged the accident publicly yesterday.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the failure, said the test did not use government funds and was not part of the development agreement with Nasa.

Blue Origin's failure shines a spotlight on the risks of commercial space ventures.

SpaceX, which has a Nasa contract to develop a commercial vehicle to haul supplies and astronauts, suffered three rocket failures before it found success. Later this year, the company, run by PayPal founder Elon Musk, will launch a capsule on a cargo test run to the International Space Station.

Virgin Galactic, founded by the UK hedonist Richard Branson, lost three workers in 2007 after an explosion rocked a California airport during testing of a propellant system for its space tourism vehicle.

The company is currently conducting flight tests in the Mojave Desert and has not yet been able to set a potential date for the first passenger flights.

Russia Roscomos Grounds Proton-M rocket after Launch Failure

Russia has grounded its workhorse Proton-M rocket as it investigates a launch mishap last week that placed a $300 million telecommunications satellite into a bad orbit, AFP reported Aug. 23. 

“The preparation of Proton-M carrier and Briz-M upper stage rocket launches is temporarily suspended until the reasons for the Express-AM4 satellite’s aborted ascent are learned,” the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, said in a statement.

Roscosmos said it had not given up entirely on Express-AM4 and was still trying to establish whether the satellite, launched Aug. 18, could be maneuvered into the correct orbit.

SpaceX Sues Safety Expert for Defamation

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) is suing Herndon, Va.-based Valador Inc. and its vice president, Joe Fragola, in Fairfax County Court for making what SpaceX says were defamatory allegations about the safety and reliability of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. 

At the heart of the suit is a June 8 email Fragola allegedly sent to NASA's chief of safety and mission assurance, Bryan O' Connor, saying he was trying to verify a rumour that the Falcon 9's first stage experienced a double engine failure during its December launch and blew up just after separation. SpaceX denied in its complaint that this occurred.

 

"'Early in June 2011, on behalf of Valador Fragola attempted to obtain a consulting contract from SpaceX worth as much as $1 million,' the SpaceX complaint states. 'He claimed that SpaceX needed an 'independent' analysis of its rocket to bolster its reputation with NASA based on what he called an unfair 'perception' about SpaceX. SpaceX did not respond favourably to Fragola's offer.

 

"'SpaceX subsequently learned that Fragola, within the scope of his employment at Valador, and by using his email account at Valador, has been contacting officials in the United States Government to make disparaging remarks about SpaceX, which have created the very 'perception' that he claimed SpaceX needed his help to rectify.

 

"SpaceX then quotes an email that it claims Fragola sent to a NASA official in NASA's Washington headquarters, on June 8: 'I have just heard a rumour, and I am trying now to check its veracity, that the Falcon 9 experienced a double engine failure in the first stage and that the entire stage blew up just after the first stage separated. I also heard that this information was being held from NASA until SpaceX can 'verify' it.'

 

"SpaceX adds: 'Fragola's statements are blatantly false, and as a purported 'expert' in the industry, he should have known that the statements were false'. SpaceX says 'there was not "double-engine" failure, nor even a single engine failure,' and that Fragosa knew and expected that his statements to NASA would be forwarded within the Government to other persons and entities, including the Aerospace Advisory Panel ('ASAP'), which among other things investigates safety and design issues of rockets."

Fragola, according to his Valador bio, was a member of the NASA Exploration Systems Architecture Study team that in 2005 picked the Ares 1 and Ares 5 rockets that the agency set out to build under the Constellation program.

See a copy of the court documents here.

NASA Space Shuttle Endeavour: Forensic Testing on Faulty LCA-2

Technicians at the NASA Shuttle Logistic Depot in Cape Canaveral, Fla., are doing additional forensic engineering testing today on a faulty power distribution box, called a Load Control Assembly 2 (LCA-2).

It was removed yesterday morning from the aft compartment of space shuttle Endeavour on Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Technicians are trying to determine what caused the power box to fail. Initial testing from yesterday shows a driver (circuit) inside the LCA-2 shorted out.

The LCA-2 feeds power to heaters on the fuel line for Endeavour’s auxiliary power unit-1 (APU-1). Initially, when the shorted out driver was replaced, the LCA-2 appeared to worked as designed. Technicians are performing additional failure analysis on the driver today to confirm whether the short experienced by the system came from inside or outside the LCA-2.

Depending on the results, additional testing of the box may be required. On Launch Pad 39A, a new LCA-2 box was installed into Endeavour this morning, and technicians are preparing to retest the system before Endeavour’s next launch attempt is scheduled.

Currently, Endeavour’s no earlier than launch date remains May 10. The APU-1 fuel line heaters did not work on April 29, prompting the launch team to scrub the Endeavour’s first launch attempt for the STS-134 mission to the International Space Station.

South Korea's Launch Failure - It's A Who Done It

South Korea's Launch Failure - It's A Who Done It

Last week, South Korea attempted a second launch of its new vehicle, the NARO-1. Unfortunately, this too failed to achieve orbit. To make a bad situation worse, the "blame game" has already started.

The Russians have apparently stated the explosion occurred in the Korean-made second stage, while the Koreans have indicated that this happened in the Russian-made first stage.

The reality of the situation is that no one yet knows what happened or why it happened. Every statement so far appears to be speculative and politically driven. This is not a good start to finding out what really went wrong.

Looking back into the long history of launch failures, one may expect the cause of this one to be the result of a combination of minor failures in the hardware, software, testing and management processes.

While it is true that a single hardware failure can cause a complete loss of the vehicle, a more common cause is a combination of things that were unforeseen, i. e., parts not performing as expected, management decision processes, software glitches, wiring mistakes, etc. One thing is almost certain, we will never be absolutely certain what actually occurred on NARO-1.

Debris are being collected and telemetry data are being reviewed. Every member of the vehicle development group and the launch team will likely be interviewed.

Experts will go over all of the available evidence. Panels will meet and discuss possible scenarios that fit the data and, in the final analysis one or more viable explanations will be presented.

Corrective measures will be recommended to avoid any of the possible failure scenarios identified. The results will be published in a NARO-1 Failure Analysis Report.

Assuming South Korea has the will to continue the development of its own launch vehicle, the next launch attempt will surely incorporate recommended fixes. Hopefully, these corrective actions will prove successful and South Korea will establish itself as a new spacefaring nation