Roscosmos Neglects to Mention Loss of Military Satellite

Rockot's liftoff from Plesetsk, Northern Russia (Credits: Eurockot).

Rockot’s liftoff from Plesetsk, Northern Russia (Credits: Eurockot).

The Breeze-KM Upper Stage that lifted off with a Rockot launch vehicle from Plesetsk on January 15, has apparently encountered a previously unreported problem affecting the deployment of the three military communications satellite carried onboard. The three Strela 3M Rodnik satellites are derived from the Strela satellite family created in the Soviet Union during the 1960s. Rodnik satellites have a useful life of five years and mass of 280 kilograms.

“The upper stage behaved abnormally, the satellites took a wrong orbit and moved faster than intended,” said a high-ranking source in Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) to Izvestia newspaper. “The satellites stayed in a stressful situation for over three months while operators were trying to make them work. At present the command center is in control of two satellites, and the third vehicle is deemed lost.”

Initially Russian officials and EuroRockot claimed that the launch was normal. However, Roscosmos did not report the abnormal situation because the three Rodnik satellites were launched in the Russian military’s interests. Col. Alexei Zolotukhin, the Aerospace Defense Forces spokesman that announced the success of the launch in January, was unable to comment when contacted by Izvestia. For the record, the upper stage was reported to be in the same orbit as the three satellites by US Strategic Command’s Space Track website a few days after the launch, meaning that the prescribed final burn to achieve a re-entry orbit was not performed.

A representative of Khrunichev, Briz-KM’s manufacturer, said that the upper stage encountered a similar failure as the one encountered by the Russian geodesy satellite, Geo-IK-2, in February 2011. Geo-IK-2 was injected, tumbling, into a lower orbit due to a failure in the upper stage’s control system. Communications were restored only after a few months and Russian engineers managed to reacquire flight control. The satellite, unable to fulfil its primary objective is now used for training personnel.

According to Roscosmos, Rockot-Briz-KM launches have been suspended until an inter-ministerial committee approves the fix proposed by the manufacturer. For this reason, the already scheduled launch of three civilian Gonets-M communications satellites has been postponed without a setting a new date. However, Khrunichev spokesman Alexander Bobrenev said that Rokot launches may be resumed in July 2013.

 

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Matteo Emanuelli

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Matteo Emanuelli is Feature Editor of Space Safety Magazine. He is a young professional from Italy but living in France where he works as engineer and project manager at Université de Picardie. He is member of the Space Generation Advisory Council where he is Co-Lead of the Space Safety Sustainability Project Group. Matteo also worked on a space debris removal mission at the Omsk State Technical University in Russia while he was enrolled at Politecnico di Milano.

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