MOSCOW -An attempt to launch the world's first solar sail spacecraft fizzled when a booster rocket failed less than two minutes after liftoff, showering debris over the Arctic Ocean, the Russian space agency said yesterday.
The Cosmos 1 vehicle, a joint Russian-American project, was intended to show that a so-called solar sail can make a controlled flight. Solar sails are envisioned as a potential means for achieving interstellar flight, allowing spacecraft to gradually build up great velocity and cover large distances.
But the Volna booster rocket failed 83 seconds after its Tuesday launch from a Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea, the Russian space agency said.
The booster's failure means that the solar sail vehicle was lost
spokesman Vyacheslav Davidenko told The Associated Press. The Russian navy is searching the area for the debris of the booster and the vehicle.
Several hours before the announcement in Russia, U.S. scientists at the California-based Planetary Society said they believed they had detected signals from the $4 million spacecraft and that it was in orbit.
Later, however, the Planetary Society conceded that if the rocket failed during first-stage firing, then this would mean that Cosmos 1 is lost.
The society, which organized the mission, said earlier signals received from three ground tracking stations seemed to indicate the craft could have made it into orbit, but the project team now considers this to be a very small probability.
Davidenko dismissed suggestions that the spacecraft might have made it into orbit as wishful thinking.
The failure of the first stage engine of the three-stage booster rocket has left no chance for the vehicle to reach orbit he told the AP, adding that fragments of the booster and the vehicle crashed into the sea.
A Russian government panel will investigate the failure, Davidenko said.
Past attempts to unfold similar devices in space have failed.
In 1999, Russia launched a similar experiment with a sun-reflecting device from its Mir space station, but the deployment mechanism jammed and the device burned up in the atmosphere.
In 2001, Russia tried again, but the device failed to separate from the booster and burned in the atmosphere.
Russia's Lavochkin research production institute built the vehicle with financing from an organization affiliated with the Planetary Society.
Lidiya Avdeyeva, a spokeswoman for the Lavochkin institute, said she could not comment on the failed launch because the Russian military officials who oversaw it had yet to provide technical details.
Lavochkin, a premier manufacturer of space probes that made interplanetary forays in the heyday of the Soviet space program, has struggled to survive after generous state funding withered following the 1991 Soviet collapse.
The solar sail vehicle weighed about 240 pounds and was designed to go into an orbit more than 500 miles high. It was designed to be powered by eight 50-foot-long sail structures resembling the blades of a windmill.
Each blade had been designed to turn to reflect sunlight in different directions so that the craft could tack much like a sailboat in the wind.
The botched launch of the solar vehicle was the second failure of a Russian booster rocket in just one day. Earlier Tuesday, the Molniya-M rocket carrying a military communications satellite failed shortly after its liftoff from a northern launch pad and fell over Siberia.
17
Archives
The Associated Press
