NASAs plans for a January launch of the next component of the International Space Station (ISS) remain unchanged, a spokesman said Thursday, despite the second failure in four months of a Russian Proton rocket and a renewed ban on all launches of Protons at their Kazakhstan site.
A similar Proton booster is slated to loft the space station's Zvezda module.
Kyle Herring, a spokesman for the ISS program at NASAs Johnson Space Center, said it was too early to determine the long-term impact of the failure on the launch of Zvezda, but there were no changes being made at present.
"Were still processing and targeting for launch in January," he said. "And the Proton has been a reliable launch vehicle, and we believe that the cause of the mishap will be identified and corrected."
The government-run launch failed within minutes of liftoff Wednesday. Fragments of the rocket and its payload -- an Express-A communications satellite built by a Russian company -- crashed more than a dozen miles from the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site.
Kazakh Prime Minister Kasymzhomart Tokayev ordered a ban Thursday on launches from the cosmodrome until a government-appointed commission clarified the circumstances surrounding the incident. A similar ban was enacted after a Proton launch failure in July and lifted in September after Russian and Kazakh officials worked out an agreement.
NASA spokeswoman Debbie Rahn said the U.S. space agency had a pre-scheduled teleconference with Russian space agency officials early Thursday. "Were still sorting it," she said of NASAs response to the Wednesday failure. "Were not in a position to speculate. Some time is going to have to pass before were in a position to say anything."
Kerring said NASA would wait for the investigation to be completed before responding in any significant way to the Wednesday failure.
For now, the failure does not change the posture of NASA toward cooperating with the Russian space agency on the International Space Station, Herring said.
"Were all full partners in the program and that includes the Russians and other international partners," Herring said.
"Even though they havent fully briefed NASA on the incident, all the partners in the program are interested in the outcome of the investigation which is already underway."
Proton is a workhorse
The Proton is considered the "workhorse" of Russian launch vehicles, with a success rate comparable to that of U.S.-made rockets, said Peter Gorin, a Russian-born scholar who studies aerospace history.
"The history of the Proton shows it is one of the most reliable launch vehicles," Gorin said.
The rocket has a 92 percent success rate, said Julie Andrews, spokeswoman for International Launch Services, a consortium of U.S., Russian and Ukrainian partners that puts up Protons and other rockets. More than 200 Protons have been launched since the heavy-lift vehicle was introduced in the 1960s. ILS was not involved in the Proton failures on Wednesday and in July.
It was used successfully to launch the first component of the International Space Station Zarya went up in November 1998 and is scheduled to launch not only the Zvezda living-quarters module but also to put up docking modules in 2001 and 2003.
Russian, NASA and other space agency officials are set to meet in early December for a routine, quarterly "general design review" meeting in Moscow, where the progress of the Proton investigation and concerns about the Zvezda launch could be aired, Herring said.
Generally, officials have been discussing technical issues related to the preparation of the Russian-built module itself in past meetings, he said.
Proton to carry Zvezda more thoroughly inspected
The high priority of the Zvezda launch reportedly has prompted the general director of the Khrunichev Space Center to conduct an intense inspection of the Proton assigned to the mission.
Anatoly Kiselev oversaw the refurbishment of the engines on the second and third stages of that Proton, according to the October issue of Novosti Kosmonavtiki, a highly regarded Russian space technology magazine.
"They will be replaced with upgraded turbo-pumps," the magazine reported. "This is a very labor-intensive and time-consuming process."
Gorin said the Proton failures must be viewed in the context of the rockets overall performance, assuming the Wednesday explosion was due to technological glitches like in the July incident.
"It would undermine the trust between the Russian space agency and NASA to a certain extent," he said, "but it should be understood that this is not something that is constant."
"This is not an inherent problem for Proton launches," he said. "If it is the same reason for yesterdays failure, this is something that could be corrected."
Another problem that afflicts Russian launches is a policy of building batches of rockets in advance, and then assigning them to missions -- sometimes years later, Gorin said. It is unclear if that situation occurred with the Protons that failed in July and on Wednesday.
Due to extensive ties to commercial launch ventures in the United States, Russian space officials are highly motivated to correct problems with the Proton, Gorin said.
The current economic crisis in Russia has influenced every branch of industry in the country, including aerospace, he said. "That is why the quality of production and control is not as high as it used to be," he said.
Overall, it is that diminished quality control that would concern NASA regarding the upcoming launch, he said.
Still, there is no insurance against launch failures, he added, noting recent failures of Titan IV rockets made in the United States.
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