WASHINGTON — Orbital Imaging Corp.'s first high-resolution imaging satellite likely re-entered the atmosphere Sept. 21 following a bad launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., aboard a Taurus rocket. Also lost in the mishap was a NASA ozone mapping satellite.

The Taurus experienced problems shortly after lift-off and failed to gain the altitude or velocity necessary to place the satellites in their proper orbits, said Barron Beneski, a spokesman for Orbital Sciences Corp., builder of the rocket. The company, based in Dulles, Va., also built both spacecraft.

The loss of the OrbView-4 satellite deals a major blow to cash-strapped Orbital Imaging (Orbimage), which recently completed a financial restructuring after missing an interest payment on its debt earlier this year. Orbital Sciences is the parent company of Orbimage.

The loss of NASA's Quick Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (QuikTOMS) satellite, meanwhile, jeopardizes the agency's continuous monitoring of the Earth's ozone layer.

Beneski said the Taurus "experienced an in-flight anomaly of an undetermined nature" during the separation of its second stage, but managed to recover and achieve orbit.

"However it appears likely that it achieved orbit at a lower altitude than intended and possibly also at a lower velocity than intended," Beneski said.

Immediately after the separation of the first and second stages, something went wrong, causing the rocket to veer wildly. It appeared to fly sideways for approximately 10 seconds.

Both satellites were deployed from the rocket's upper stage but are presumed to have re-entered the atmosphere, Beneski said.

The launch was the sixth mission for the Taurus rocket since 1994. All five previous Taurus launches were successful.

Orbimage was banking on a successful launch of OrbView-4 to finally position the company to compete in a high-resolution imagery market dominated by two companies, Thornton, Colo.-based Space Imaging and ImageSat International, an Israeli concern based in Cypress.

Gil Rye, president of Orbimage, said during a Sept. 20 pre-launch conference call with reporters that OrbView-3, slated for launch next year, is the company's fall-back position in the event of losing OrbView-4.

Some analysts have questioned whether the company can afford the wait. Paul Nisbet, president of the Newport, R.I.-based investment banking firm JSA Research, said in a recent interview that Orbimage probably would not survive a launch failure or on-orbit failure of OrbView-4.

But Rye said in a recent interview that OrbView-4 was well enough insured to weather the year-long wait for OrbView-3.

OrbView-4 was designed to take black-and-white pictures with 1-meter resolution, which is sharp enough to distinguish ground objects of that size or larger. The satellite was also built to return full color imagery with 4-meter resolution. From its near-polar orbit, it would have been able to revisit ground locations approximately every three days, according to Mike Lembeck, OrbView-4 satellite program manager.

The loss of OrbView-4 also is bad news for the U.S. Air Force, which paid to have an experimental hyperspectral imaging capability added to the satellite. That experiment was dubbed Warfighter-1.

Orbimage had been looking forward to capitalizing on the international marketing rights to the satellite's hyperspectral data products. OrbView-3 does not have a hyperspectral imaging capability.

For NASA, the loss of the QuikTOMS satellite raises the likelihood that the U.S. space agency will be unable to avoid a gap in its 23-year continuous observation of the Earth's ozone layer. The U.S. government has flown ozone mapping instruments on a continuous basis since launching the Nimbus weather satellite in 1978.

The Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer, launched in 1998, is more than one year past its two-year design life.

Rick McPeters, the QuickTOMS project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md, said the 160-kilogram satellite was meant to keep the data flowing between the demise of Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer Earth Probe and the launch of NASA's Aura environmental satellite in mid-2003. That spacecraft will have an advanced ozone-mapping instrument built by the Dutch, McPeters said. After Aura, ozone mapping will be carried out by a new series of U.S. weather satellites that will serve both military and civilian users, McPeters said.

The launch failure has also hurt Houston-based Celestis Foundation, a company that puts cremated human remains in orbit.

The Celestis payload, fixed to the rocket's final stage, did not achieve its proper orbit and re-entered. "We splashed into the ocean with everyone else," said Celestis Foundation President Charles Chafer. "We don't actually receive any funds until we provide a successful service," he said.