ALMATY, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Kazakhstan on Friday partially lifted a ban on launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome imposed last month after a Russian Proton-K rocket crashed on its territory shortly after takeoff, a senior space official said.
The suspension of Proton boosters, key workhorses in Moscow's space program, will remain in place while a Russian commission looks into the causes of the late October accident in more detail, the official added.
"Launches will be allowed of all rocket boosters apart from Protons,'' Nurlan Utembayev, deputy head of Kazakhstan's National Space Committee, told Reuters.
Utembayev said the agreement was reached after a meeting of a joint Kazakh-Russian commission established to investigate the causes behind the latest rocket failure.
"They concluded the meeting late last night, and signed two agreements - one on cooperation in the event of future accidents and a second on setting out plans for future launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome,'' he said.
The sides also agreed on financial compensation for the crash, but Utembayev declined to name the sum involved. He added that the issue of environmental controls at Baikonur, located in the south of the vast Central Asian state, had been settled.
The next rocket scheduled to take off from Baikonur is a Soyuz booster on November 22.
The October crash was the second involving a Russian Proton this year.
The first was in July, when a booster exploded before reaching orbit, raining debris over the remote Kazakh steppe. It led to a temporary ban on all launches, also lifted in stages by the Kazakh government.
While the latest deal will come as a relief to Russia's troubled space program, the Proton ban remains a concern.
The booster, designed to carry heavy cargoes, is due to transport the long-delayed Zvezda living module for the $60 billion International Space Station in late 1999 or early 2000.
Kazakh space officials say it may not be until February or March next year that Protons are allowed to blast off again.
Normally friendly relations between the two former Soviet neighbors have been tested by the rocket crashes, although Moscow has handled the second accident more diplomatically than the first.
But anger among Kazakhs, sensitive to what they see as bullying tactics by their mighty northern neighbor, is still running high.
"Russia believes this is just a game, and that its main objective is to win trumps to use in talks on payments,'' the Delovaya Nedelya weekly newspaper said on Friday.
Russia rents Baikonur from Kazakhstan for an annual fee of $115 million. Payment delays have been another bone of contention between the countries.
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