Russia loses six space vehicles over nine months

MOSCOW, August 24 (Itar-Tass) – Russia has lost six space vehicles over the past nine months.

Wednesday, August 24, the launch of a Progress cargo craft to the International Space Station ended in a failure.

In December 2010, a faulty functioning of the booster resulted in a loss of three satellites of the global positioning and navigation system GLONASS.

Defense satellite Geo-Ik-2 failed to reach a designated orbit in February 2011 and thus to fulfill the functions it had been designed for.

Express-AM-4 telecommunications satellite failed to get to a designated orbit August 18.

Itar-Tass dossier bureau says this is an unfortunate appendage to a number of launch mishaps that occurred in the past few years.

A collapse culminated the liftoff of the Molniya-M carrier rocket from the Plesetsk space center in northern Russia June 21, 2005. It was to take into space the Molniya-3K defense telecommunications satellite.

October 28, 2005, an unscheduled situation sprang up at the Mozhayets-5 satellite – the probe failed to separate from the second stage of the rocket and was lost.

In the small hours of June 27, 2006, the crash of a carrier rocket in the Dnepr family consigned to history the Baumanets micro-satellite designed by the students of Moscow’s Nikolai Bauman Technological University, the first Belarussian satellite BelKA and another 16 small satellites from Italy, the U.S., and Colombia.

The crash occurred right after the rocket’s liftoff.

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