Russia-Launched U.S. Satellite Is Lost

A $60-million U.S. commercial satellite failed to reach its intended orbit aboard a Russian-built rocket Tuesday during a second doomed attempt to launch the American payload.

Initial reports by Russian media said the second stage of the Kosmos-3M booster rocket shut down prematurely, deploying the satellite owned by EarthWatch of Longmont, Colo., into an orbit outside the range of its communications.

But officials of the Russian space services facility later insisted that the launch from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the far north was carried out correctly, suggesting that the failure was with the satellite, whose mission was to take high-resolution photographs of the Earth’s surface.

The Quick Bird satellite took off at 2 a.m. aboard the Russian-built rocket bound for an orbit 375 miles above Earth. But ground controllers lost contact with the spacecraft shortly after launch, and it never made radio communication.

EarthWatch is waiting for information from its representatives at the launch site and doesn’t expect to have an assessment of the cause of the failed deployment for several days, company spokesman Chuck Herring said in a telephone interview from Colorado.

“The satellite is effectively lost,” the Interfax news agency quoted a spokesman for the Russian Aerospace Agency in Plesetsk as saying.

A spokesman at Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces headquarters in Moscow said he had no information about any failure of the booster rocket. “There is nothing to be happy about in a situation like this, but we completed our task without a hitch,” said the spokesman, Alexander Buchin.

Russia’s NTV television network reported that Quick Bird, a 10-foot-long payload weighing 2,100 pounds, is expected to fall out of orbit and crash back to Earth, but Herring said no information is available yet on the fate of the satellite.

EarthWatch tried to deploy a forerunner to the Quick Bird, the Early Bird 1, on Dec. 24, 1997, but lost contact with that satellite four days later. The company tried to locate its errant equipment for several months, announcing only in April 1998 that it was collecting its $29-million insurance on the Early Bird 1 and pushing ahead with a more advanced replacement.

The satellite lost Tuesday was also fully insured, Herring confirmed while declining to specify the value of the Quick Bird. Russian media have consistently reported the figure as $60 million.

Quick Bird was to have been the first of two EarthWatch satellites built by another Colorado company, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., that would produce the first high-resolution satellite imagery for commercial sale. The market for such photographs for use in mapping and resource exploration is expected to range between $1 billion and $3 billion a year, Herring reported.

The Plesetsk cosmodrome has launched 1,500 rockets carrying more than 1,900 satellites since 1966--38% of all satellites deployed in the world, the military-run space services reported earlier this year.

Although most of the launches at Plesetsk have been successful and a rare income-generating operation for Russia, the facility has also been the scene of several major aerospace accidents. In 1973, nine technicians were killed in a launch-pad accident, and 50 died in an explosion in 1980 while fueling a Soyuz rocket.