MOSCOW -- Three satellies originally intended to be launched at the end of 2001 will be sent into space by mid-year in order to make up for some of the spacecraft lost in this week's failure of a Tsiklon 3 rocket, a Russian space official told SPACE.com on Saturday.
"Russia has three Kosmos-type satellites in stock, similar to those which were lost during the Tsiklon 3 launch failure on December 27," said Georgy Poleshchuk, Rosaviakosmos Deputy General Director. "We will probably use another booster to launch them."
There were six satellites overall on the top of Tsiklon 3 booster. Three of them were Kosmos-type satellites to be used by Russian anti-aircraft defense forces. The other three -- Gonets D1 -- were to become part of a low-orbit constellation of communication satellites deployed in space three years ago.
Meanwhile, the investigation into the cause of the Tsiklon 3 failure continues, but there is nothing new to report. In fact, investigators have yet to agree on what actually happened.
Rocket Strategic Forces (RVSN) representatives who handled the launch, still believe that the satellites could be in a low orbit. They were supposed to be delivered to an 870-mile-high (1,400 kilometer-high) orbit above Earth. RVSN specialists believe the satellites may eventually be detected later while circling the globe at very low altitude.
A Plesetsk Cosmodrome representative, however, maintains the Tsiklon 3 third stage and its attached satellites burned up in the Earth's atmosphere over Vrangel Island in Russia's far northeast. A special commission formed to determine the cause of crash consists of representatives from RVSN, Rosaviakosmos and NPO Yuzhmash -- the Tsiklon 3 manufacturer. All Tsiklon-type boosters operations will be ceased until the commission makes a definite conclusion about the reasons for the failure.
NPO Prikladnoi Mekhaniki -- a Siberian-based factory named after Mikhail Reshetnev which makes about 70 percent of Russian satellites -- expects a contract to build new satellites to replace the six lost spacecraft.
The company, located in Zheleznogorsk, Eastern Siberia, had built all of the satellites lost this week.
Russia launched more than a dozen NPO-made satellites in 2000 alone, including a Russian-French TV and radio satellite destined to broadcast to Europe, Siberia and the Far East.
According to Viktor Kozlov, chief of Automatic Spacecraft Directorate at Rosaviakosmos, who was in charge of deployment of six satellites into orbit, "it will be very difficult to find a true reason for the crash since too many people and organizations were involved in the Tsiklon 3 launch preparation, including civil scientific institutes and the Ministry of Defense."
"It was very unfortunate that Tsiklon 3 had to be used for the launch of both military and civil spacecraft," stressed Kozlov. He made it clear that this was done for the reason of saving money for Russia's malnourished space budget.
According to Kozlov, the most probable cause of failure is an electronics malfunction in the rocket. He totally discarded a possibility of Tsiklon 3 being destroyed by an adversary missile.
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