MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia's Space Forces launched a Molniya satellite early Friday, augmenting the country's military communications network in space.
A four-stage Molniya-M rocket -- a version of the workhorse Soyuz booster -- blasted off from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk region, about 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) north of Moscow, the Space Forces said. It was carrying a satellite to be controlled by the Defense Ministry.
The satellite reached its target, high elliptical orbit less than an hour after the launch, the Space Forces press service said.
The Russian government has lacked the funds to modernize its satellite force, which has become increasingly obsolete.
Russian Aerospace Agency chief Yuri Koptev said last year that about 80 percent of the nation's military and civilian satellites had already served their designated lifetime.
In other Russian space news, Russia hopes to start using its rockets for commercial space launches from the Kourou launch pad in French Guiana in 2006 under a deal reached with the European Space Agency, the nation's top space official said earlier this week.
Russian Aerospace Agency director Yuri Koptev said modernization work on Kourou intended to prepare it for launching Russian Soyuz rockets would begin in September. ``Work on infrastructure and the rocket, which will undergo a thorough upgrade, is to be completed by the end of 2005, and launches will start in 2006,'' Koptev told the ITAR-Tass news agency during a visit to the Paris Air Show.
Upgrading the Kourou facility has been estimated to cost about euro250 million (US$295 million).
Koptev said that Arianespace, the European satellite-launch services company, would cover half of the project's cost through borrowing on government guarantees, and ESA would pay the rest of the bill. France has agreed to contribute half of ESA's share in the project, he said.
Koptev had said earlier that the agreement was stymied by European demands for Russia to share launch pad construction costs, which it rejected as unfair, saying it considers the Soyuz technology a sufficient contribution.
Koptev did not say how the partners would divide the proceeds from Kourou launches.
Russia has pushed for access to Kourou because its proximity to the equator would allow Russian rockets to carry heavier cargoes to higher orbits, compared with launches from the Baikonur cosmodrome, which Russia leases from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan.
Koptev said Wednesday that launches from Kourou would be two and a half times more efficient than Baikonur launches.
Russia plans to continue using Baikonur, too, and wants to extend its 20-year lease on the launch site to 50 years. The northern location of Russia's own cosmodrome, Plesetsk, makes it unfit for most commercial launches, and the site is used almost entirely for military purposes.
Koptev said that by pooling its efforts with Arianespace, Russia could earn a wider share in the world market for satellite launches. The Soyuz rocket has been a workhouse of the Soviet and then-Russian space program since the 1960s and has a reputation for reliability.
Russia's space program has gained new importance following the Feb. 1 disaster of the space shuttle Columbia. The subsequent grounding of the U.S. shuttle fleet has left Soyuz crew capsules and Progress cargo ships as the only links to the international space station, which is now occupied by a Russian and an American.
The need to maintain the station has forced Russia to suspend flying space tourists, a source of extra cash, to the orbiting outpost.
In anticipation of the resumption of shuttle missions, Russia has signed a deal with Space Adventures, a U.S. company based in Virginia, on two prospective tourist flights in 2004 and 2005, Russian Aerospace Agency's spokesman Sergei Gorbunov said Wednesday, according to ITAR-Tass. He gave no details of the agreement.
Space Adventures helped organize the flights of the world's first space tourists, American businessman Dennis Tito and South African Mark Shuttleworth.
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