 | | | | | | | | | | |  |  | | | | Space: European satellite misses orbit">3. Space News | | | | | | | 
3. Space News | News submitted by: MIB
MOSCOW, Russia (Reuters) -- Russia has failed to put a five-tonne European communications satellite properly into orbit and it will now circle uselessly until it eventually falls back to Earth, space officials said.
Konstantin Kreidenko, spokesman for Russia's space authority Rosaviakosmos, told Reuters the Astra-1K satellite was stuck in an intermediate orbit after being launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The French-made Astra satellite is the world's biggest communications satellite, with antennae spanning 37 metres. It was due to be used for radio and television broadcasts as well as for mobile telephone and Internet services in western Europe.
"The satellite has not reached its assigned orbit and will now never reach it," Kreidenko said.
Kreidenko said a secondary booster, which was due to propel the satellite to a higher altitude, had malfunctioned and was circling the earth separately from its payload.
The Astra satellite, launched by a Proton rocket, was now doomed to orbit the earth until gravity pulled it back to Earth, he said.
"Both the satellite and the booster will after a while fall back to Earth. Both will burn with maybe small bits reaching the Earth's surface, depending on what materials the satellite was made of," Kreidenko said. "But there is no danger."
In October, a Soyuz cargo rocket, carrying a European satellite, exploded on lift-off from Russia's Arctic Plesetsk launch pad. Two days later a Proton rocket successfully blasted a European research laboratory into orbit from Baikonur.
Proton was conceived in the 1960s initially as a heavy-lift rocket to carry bombs.
Russia leases the Soviet-era Baikonur cosmodrome from Kazakhstan, keeping it as its main space base.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/11/26/astra.fail.reut/index.html
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