CONTACT BURT RUTAN!!!!!
Posted on 06/21/2005 5:58:07 PM PDT by cabojoe
Russian sailors launched the world's first solar sail from a nuclear submarine today as planned, but the Cosmos 1 craft's fate remains unknown after the first set of ground station passes turned up no sign of the small satellite. Casting further doubt, the Russian news service ITAR-TASS reported the rocket's first stage failed 83 seconds after liftoff. Confirmation of that story is pending.
(Excerpt) Read more at spaceflightnow.com ...
Russia 0-2 launches in last two days.
Uh, I don't normally believe conspiracies..
But maybe Russia kept the sattelite to study it, and knowingly sent a bad rocket up?
You never know..
This was launched on top of an ICBM. Haha.. We were worried all through the cold war about these things and half of them are duds. /Whistling past the graveyard
From solar sail to sailfish in 83 seconds.
That's a shame.
Yup, it's a bad day on the midway. I work with a Russian kid and he didn't believe that the rocket blew up until he read it in a Russian newspaper.
Helen America, call your office.
besides , they helped design it. LOL
NASA could have done that in far less time.
This must be the infamous SS-18 missiles converted to peace time uses. I'm not surprised that these things are so unreliable, hopefully the Planetary Society had insurance.
Only half?
I forget where the data came from but when I worked on the Iridium team we lost a few satellites after they were "lofted" from the carrier...in short order we received detailed reports indicating what, when, where...how many pieces...etc...I think the data came from TRW but more than likely NASA...
Heh. True enough, though... we've done the same thing. After the various SALT agreements when some of our Titans were decommisioned from nuclear duty they found new life pushing satellites into space.
I don't remember exactly, and maybe somebody can correct me, but I think the Titan was essentially the same rocket body that was developed for the Gemini project.
Just got in and was hoping for better news. Dang, you don't get to see a new type of space craft go up every day.
Just damn.
Been there done that. I sat console for more than 5 hours scanning a predicted insertion orbit looking for a satellite after launch. We had not been given the word the launch vehicle failed. :-(
Update for June 22 @ 1 a.m. EDT: Mission controllers revealed a short time ago that weak blips of data believed transmitted from the Cosmos 1 spacecraft have been found in recordings at tracking station passes immediately after launch. The Planetary Society originally said that no signals were heard. If the new revelation is true, it suggests that the solar sail did reach some sort of orbit around Earth despite what Russian media reports indicate was a rocket engine problem during ascent. However, the U.S. military's space tracking network has not found the craft and its current orbit is unknown. "So now we search. It could take days to find," the Society said in a statement.
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