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Russia Starts Probe of Proton Launch Failure; ILS Forms Review Board |
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MCLEAN, Va., March 6, 2006/Satnews Daily/ ¾ The Russian space agency said on Friday the state commission tasked to investigate the anomaly that caused a Proton Breeze M vehicle to place Arabsat 4A satellite into an incorrect orbit on March 1 has started its work.
Rocosmos, Russia’s space agency, said the commission has been ordered to complete its investigation by March 30.
The commission is led by Victor Remishevsky, deputy director of Roscosmos. Deputy chairmen are Yuri Bakhvalov, first deputy general designer from Khrunichev, which built the Proton vehicle and the Breeze M upper stage, and Alexander Chulkov, Roscosmos director of payload deployment systems.
The launch of Arabsat 4A on Wednesday was carried out under the auspices of International Launch Services (ILS), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center.
Independent of the Russian commission, ILS is also forming a Failure Review Oversight Board, which will be chaired by Eric Laursen, ILS vice president and chief engineer. The oversight board is chartered to independently review the methods, conclusions and corrective action recommendations of the Russian state commission investigation and to report on the findings. All oversight board activities will be subject to relevant U.S. government regulations.
Meanwhile, Rocosmos has reiterated there is no need
to ban launches of Proton-M rockets following the recent failure of the
Arabsat 4A communications satellite. The next launch of a Proton-M rocket is scheduled for the second half of May 2006.
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