A Proton rocket carrying three Glonass satellites has crashed shortly after take-off in another blow to Russia’s plans for its own satellite navigation system.
The rocket veered off course and exploded just seconds after launching from Kazakhstan’s…
A Proton rocket carrying three Glonass satellites has crashed shortly after take-off in another blow to Russia’s plans for its own satellite navigation system.
The rocket veered off course and exploded just seconds after launching from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur space centre, prompting fears of contamination from the toxic fuel on board.
It is the latest in a string of technical problems and launch failures for Proton, which was also to blame for the loss of three other Glonass satellites in 2010.
However, whereas these issues have previously stemmed from the upper stage of the rocket, called Breeze M, footage of the latest incident indicates a problem on its first stage, or Block DM.
All Proton missions could be grounded for months as an investigation gets underway into the cause of this latest issue, which risks having a knock-on impact for satellite operators awaiting their own launches.
International Launch Services (ILS), which markets the Proton vehicle to commercial customers, had only returned to flight in March after the rocket failed to place the Yamal-402 satellite for Russia’s Gazprom Space Systems late last year.
The launch provider had been speedily working through its mission backlog and had plans to launch one commercial mission per month until August, with potentially two more slated for Q4.
A satellite for SES was next in the pipeline, and there were also a small number of federal Proton missions planned for later this year.
ILS was unable to comment on how future Proton launches will be affected at the time of going to press. In a statement, it said early reports suggest no one was harmed in the incident and there was no damage to launch pads that were near the impact area, with only minor damage to nearby buildings.
Regardless of how ILS attempts to avoid a ‘bottleneck’ of its launch supply, industry sources have suggested the failure will likely lead to a further differentiation in the insurance pricing of the Proton compared with its rivals, particularly France’s Ariane 5 rocket.
Willis is due to test market appetite for Proton when it places the final tranche of launch-plus-one coverage for Russian satellite operator RSCC’s Express-AM5 and -AM6 satellites over the next couple of months.
SatelliteFinance understands that there was no insurance for the Glonass satellites themselves, which is not unusual for military programmes in the country, although Russia’s state-run RIA news agency claimed the rocket was insured for Rb 6bn (US$182m) with the Russian Insurance Center.
According to SatelliteFinance sources, there was US$100m of third party insurance for the launch.
Even still, it is unclear whether any claim for cleaning up the disaster area could be made, because there are typically no claims for damage to Baikonur’s launch site as it is deemed to be first party and not third party.
The incident also risks flaring up tensions between Kazakhstan and Russia over the environmental impact of the latter’s leasing of the Baikonur space centre. The Kazak authorities have briefly suspended Russian rocket launches in the past after failures spilt toxic fuel.
Russia’s Glonass programme, which has been mired in controversy over allegations of fraud in its funding, aims to give the country a navigation system similar to GPS in the US.
The failure comes as India celebrates the launch of the first satellite for its own navigation system, called IRNSS-1A.
