Satellite News

The crash of the Proton space rocket on 16 May was due to a failed bearing in the steering engine’s turbo pump, the chief of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, Oleg Ostapenko, was quoted as saying.

The commission looking into the Proton accident on 16 May will finish its work on 8 June and report the findings to the Russian government. The launch of another Proton-M carrier rocket with a Luch (a.k.a. Olymp) satellite scheduled for 20 June is likely to be postponed.

Shortly before the failure of a Proton-M last week, a sharp pressure drop was recorded in the piping of its third stage control engine, Roskosmos said. In related news, a replacement for the lost Ekspress AM4R satellite is likely to be built by a Russian company.

A Proton-M rocket has failed to place the Ekspress-AM4R communications satellite into orbit. The rocket lifted off at 2142 UTC on 15 May 2014. The failure occurred nine minutes into flight at an altitude of 161 km during the operation of the vehicle’s third stage.

According to satellite maker Orbital Sciences Corp., the capacity of the recently launched Amazonas 4A will likely be permanently reduced owing to a power subsystem failure detected during in-orbit testing. The company does not expect a similar failure to occur aboard other satellites.

Following the launch of the Amazonas 4A from Kourou on board Arianespace’s Ariane 5 ECA launch vehicle and its subsequent positioning in the geostationary orbit, an anomaly has been detected in the satellite’s performance related to the power subsystem.

Russia is still considering the amount of damages requested by Kazakhstan to compensate the environmental harm caused by the Proton-M carrier rocket crash, Tengrinews reported.

The December launch failure of a Chang Zheng rocket with the CBERS-3 satellite onboard was caused by a clogged fuel line, China Great Wall Industry Corp. said.