MOSCOW (Interfax-AVN) --
The Russian Space Forces launched a Kosmos-3M rocket carrying a military
satellite from the Plesetsk space center on Tuesday, Lt. Col. Alexei
Zolotukhin, a spokesman for the Russian Space Forces, told Russia's Interfax
News Agency.
The satellite will serve the Russian
Defense Ministry's purposes and will join the Russian military satellite
constellation, he said.
"The rocket launch
passed normally," he said.
The Titov space test and
control center is now tracking the rocket, and the satellite is to be put into
orbit at 6:08 p.m. Moscow time (2:08 p.m. GMT), when it will be out of sight of
ground automatic control systems, Zolotukhin said.
Tuesday's successful
Kosmos-3M liftoff came less than a week after the failure of
another Russian-built rocket, a Proton-M booster, which crashed on the uninhabited
steppes of Kazakhstan while attempting
to orbit a Japanese communications satellite.
An investigation into that
failed launch from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome is underway.
SPACE.com Staff Writer Tariq Malik contributed to this report from New York City.
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