Satellite Lost as Booster on Russian Rocket Fails

The final booster on a Russian-made Proton-K rocket failed more than six hours into its launch Thursday, dumping the satellite it was carrying into a useless orbit and turning the $100-million project built in the Los Angeles area into a 4-ton mass of space junk.

It was the third major failure in less than two years of the DM-3 booster, built by the Moscow-based Energiya company that also designed the troubled Mir space station. Russian space officials, pledging to investigate the causes, conceded that this latest disaster was likely to bloody the already bruised reputation of their aerospace industry.

“This incident is very unpleasant and might be fraught with consequences for the commercial side of our business,” said Sergei A. Gorbunov, spokesman for the Russian Space Agency. “Our competitors from the United States, China and France will no doubt use this opportunity to discredit our space program and lure away our customers.”

The Russian agency began carrying foreign satellites into space two years ago as part of an effort to convert once-secret military aerospace operations into income-generating civilian services. Each launch of a commercial satellite is said to earn about $70 million for cash-strapped Russia.

The affected satellite, the ASIASAT-3, was built by El Segundo-based Hughes Space & Communications International for Asia Satellite Telecommunications Holdings of Hong Kong. It was designed to extend digital satellite communication services throughout Asia, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union.

The satellite was fully insured, but officials said it would take at least two years to build a replacement.

Launch had been scheduled for Tuesday but was postponed due to bad weather around the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan.

The delay underscored the importance Russian space officials attach to the commercial ventures they need in order to underwrite manned space programs as well as keep their army of aerospace scientists gainfully employed.

Thursday’s launch proceeded flawlessly from liftoff at 2:19 a.m. Moscow time through the separation of three earlier stages and an initial firing of the DM-3 booster intended to propel the satellite into its proper orbit.

But six hours and 20 minutes into the flight, the second firing of the booster cut off after only a few seconds, instead of the programmed two minutes, causing the 7,600-pound satellite to fall into the wrong orbit.

“There is very little chance the satellite will drop out of orbit and enter the atmosphere,” Gorbunov said, noting that even in the unlikely event of its return to Earth, it would break up into harmless small pieces.

But having been deployed into the wrong orbital path, “ASIASAT-3 has been turned into a heap of scrap metal that will be yet another contribution of ours in cluttering up outer space,” he sighed.

Energiya spokesman Sergei K. Gromov observed: “In every practical sense, the satellite has been lost.”

The telecommunications satellite was supposed to orbit with an apogee of 22,320 miles and a perigee of 6,200 miles but has entered an elliptical orbit with a perigee of only 125 miles.

An investigation has been ordered into the cause of the failed mission, said Sergei A. Zhiltsov, spokesman for the Khrunichev Space Center here that developed the Proton-K rocket. He declined to speculate about the cause of the mishap until the investigation is completed, but the Itar-Tass news agency quoted an unidentified Khrunichev official as saying the DM-3 booster failed because of a burned-out gas generator.

The Proton-K has been used successfully at least 200 times, with only about a dozen failures, mostly in testing phases. But three of its most spectacular failures have been traced to the DM-3 booster: the current project, the November 1996 destruction of Russia’s interplanetary Mars probe and the erroneous deployment of the Russian Raduga satellite nine months earlier.

Coincidentally, the ASIASAT-3 failure occurred six months to the day after the disastrous June 25 collision of the Mir space station with a supply drone--the worst accident to befall the orbital complex in its 11-year history. However, the Mir crash has been blamed on human error rather than mechanical or technological failure.

Thursday’s loss was insignificant financially because all parties were insured, Energiya’s Gromov stated. “But it is bad for our image and may reflect negatively on our business in the future.”

The Russian Space Agency will probably be forced to lower prices for launching commercial satellites if it wants to remain in the competition for foreign projects, agency spokesman Gorbunov conceded.