TheProton-M launcher, which was to place threesatellites of the Russian navigation and positioning system GLONASS, fell this morning at the Baikonur space base (on the territory of Kazakhstan) in the first minute after takeoff.
As reported by the Russian space agency Roscosmos,the accident occurred due to an emergency shutdown of the carrier rocket propellants. For his part, Kazakhstan’s Minister of Emergency Situations attributed the Proton-M crash to first-stage propellant problems.
The remains of the impeller fellabout 2.5 kilometers from the launch pad without causing casualties or destructionRoscosmos communicated. Tatiana Koroleva, head of the environmental safety laboratory at Moscow’s Lomonosov University, ruled out that the accident led to an ecological catastrophe and contamination by heptyl, a highly toxic substance used as fuel in Protons. “In such a powerful explosion, the heptyl would have been totally burned up in the atmosphere,” he said.
Everything points to whatthe accident will force the suspension of launches from Baikonur for up to three months, which may also affect the space delivery schedule of the Russian Progress M-20M freighter originally scheduled for July 27.
In 2012, a group of experts valued almost$ 1 billion in damages from failed Roscosmos launches in 2010-2012, in particular, the accident of another Proton that failed to place three GLONASS satellites in orbit in 2010, the loss of the Express-AM4 telecommunications satellite, the Progress M-12M freighter, as well as the Russian interplanetary probe Phobos-Grunt in 2011 , and the accident of August 7, 2012 when the launch of another Proton-M with two communications satellites on board failed.
