Russia loses contact with satellite after launch from new spaceport

VOSTOCHNY, Russia: Russia said it had lost contact yesterday with a weather satellite just hours after it was launched from its Vostochny cosmodrome, in only the second rocket liftoff from the new spaceport.

The glitch was a fresh embarrassment for the Kremlin and emblematic of problems plaguing Russia’s beleaguered space programme which has suffered a series of setbacks over recent years, experts said.

Apart from the Meteor weather satellite, the rocket carried 18 payloads from institutions and companies in Canada, the United States, Japan, Germany, Sweden and Norway.

“During the first scheduled communication session with the space vehicle, contact has not been established because it is not on its planned orbit,” the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.

Roscosmos representatives declined to provide further comment, saying only that specialists were looking to determine the cause of the problem. But an industry source, speaking to Interfax news agency, chalked up the glitch to a human error, saying that the rocket booster and the satellite had likely tumbled into the Atlantic Ocean.

“According to preliminary data, there was a mistake in the flight task of the carrier rocket and the Frigate booster,” the source was quoted as saying.

President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he did not have immediate information about the cause of the accident.

Marking another milestone after the inaugural liftoff last year, the Soyuz rocket carrying the weather satellite and other payloads took off at 2.41pm ( 0541 GMT) from far eastern Russia.

Roscosmos said after the liftoff that “all the initial stages of the rocket’s flight went according to plan”.

National television broadcast live footage of the launch, showing the rocket taking off into a grey sky in the Amur region near the Chinese border.

The first launch from Vostochny spaceport took place in April 2016, with Putin overseeing the takeoff. It represented a major development for the country’s space sector, with the new cosmodrome touted to mark a rebirth of an industry plagued by a string of embarrassments.

The first satellite launch had been scheduled for late 2015, but setbacks forced authorities to review the timetable.