A unmanned Russian Proton-M rocket exploded moments after leaving the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today, destroying its payload of three satellites intended for Russia's Glonass GPS system. Fortunately no-one was injured, but local news service Interfax is reporting that nearly 500 tons of fuel from the craft has contaminated the crash site. There's no word on what caused the disaster, but this model's recent history is fraught with equipment failures -- so if you'd like to see the latest disaster (spoiler: explosions) the video resides after the jump.
Amazingly no one on the ground was hurt, and only lost 3 satellites in the payload....I'd imagine they had activated some form of self-destruct signal after it flipped and turned into the worlds biggest cruise missle.
Remind me to sign up with a different space program for my space tourist days ahead, albeit it they probably use different rockets.
Ya, this was a Proton-M rocket, while I believe the Soyuz personnel craft is launched by a (duh) Soyuz-2 rocket.
But not really a good sign for the Russian quality as a whole, 4 Proton rockets have been lost since 2007 and this is the 3rd year in a row with one lost.
Pray Space-X gets their human carrying abilities up and running sooner so we're not reliant on the Russians before something bad goes wrong with a Soyuz.
As per russian sources (I failed to check it with NASA site, as it seem to have only future launches), russians have had 15 launches this year (2 of them failed) and USA only 7. EU has 4, China 3, India 2, Japan and Korean have 1. Russia is still dominating space country, even if some recent fails are concerning. It is the nature of business, that successful start makes no news and failed launch is so spectacular and interesting.
As per russian sources (I failed to check it with NASA site, as it seem to have only future launches), russians have had 15 launches this year (2 of them failed) and USA only 7. EU has 4, China 3, India 2, Japan and Korean have 1. Russia is still dominating space country, even if some recent fails are concerning. It is the nature of business, that successful start makes no news and failed launch is so spectacular and interesting.
Additional to the space program, aren't there planes falling out of the sky built by Russian Government programs?
I know the NASA corporate culture has a lot to learn, people have been very critical of it, however, I would be very interested in what the Russian counterpart is.
Its just seems that the concept of space exploration has completely lost steam, what should be one of the great focuses to bring all of us together has basically become a courier service.
We're still using concepts and base technology from the 70's, even moreso with the retirement of the re-usable Space Shuttles.
We're been stuck for so long with the concept of just getting things into orbit, that we don't really get all that excited about getting people beyond that.
After man finished with the moon, the discussion was, what's next, where do we go from here?
Long range trips to mars, bases on the moon.
Now rockets are there to haul freight and act as a bus services.
Even the vaunted private industry is more interested in celebrity orbits then building a hotel in space, or looking at getting to the moon or mars or wherever for the minerals.
I don't know whether we've lost our desire to explore, to do the difficult thing.
But NASA is pretty well dead. The Russian's are using the same things that failed 20 or 30 or 40 years ago and the Chinese are following suit.
The International Space station is nice, but it just doesn't seem to be all of that forward thinking.
There has to be more to space exploration then to experiment on the effects of low gravity on screws.
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I love the sad face that shows in the top left corner on the video around 0:42. Awesome Russian journalism, it really hammers home the emotion of the situation.
well I guess we see what happens when all their captured German scientist died....
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Russian space rocket explodes after take-off
