Russian rocket failure poisons relations

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

Last month's crash of a Russian Dnepr space booster with 100 tons of toxic rocket propellant poisoned a small corner of the empty steppes in Central Asia — but may have left a wider legacy of bitterness that will impact Russian space activities for years to come.

And whatever the actual cause of the rocket’s embarrassing failure, the poisonous consequences could have been largely avoided if Moscow space officials hadn’t reverted to almost Soviet-style cover-ups and hollow reassurances about the accident.

The human cost of the accident was, initially, zero — as far as is known, nobody was killed or even injured when the debris fell back to Earth. At one point part of the rocket exploded fiercely, digging a crater 165 feet (50 meters) wide and 50 feet (15 meters) deep. Bland assurances that “all is well” were belied by a blackout on photographs of the impact site and on interviews with recovery personnel.

So in the weeks that followed, local residents grew more anxious, and demands for damages skyrocketed as some villagers requested evacuation as well as remuneration for the loss of their pastoral incomes — out of fear that no one would buy food products from such a poisoned region. Kazakh politicians, including a former Soviet cosmonaut, denounced the lack of apparent cooperation and candor from Russian officials.

Midnight disaster
The disaster began near midnight local time on July 26-27, as the converted military missile climbed toward space along an unusual and potentially dangerous trajectory. Because the payloads were aiming for a peculiar polar orbit that actually was slightly tilted against Earth’s rotation, the ascent’s ground track was slightly westerly of due south.

From Pad 109 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, such a path soon took the ascending rocket nearly directly over the city of Baikonur and neighboring villages where 100,000 people live. Only a handful of the thousands of space and missile launches from Baikonur in the past half-century had ever headed in this direction — the others flew to the northeast, wringing the greatest energy benefit from Earth’s spin while carefully dodging the Chinese border.

So when word came that the rocket had failed 86 seconds into its flight, observers quickly grew concerned over where it was going to come down. Their worst fears soon seemed to be confirmed by reports of an impact 15 miles (25 kilometers) from the launch pad — well within the boundaries of the inhabited region.

Fortunately, that figure was soon revealed to have been garbled. The rocket’s autopilot had shut the engines off near the end of the first-stage burn, when it was 15 miles along its predicted ground track, but high in space and already moving very fast. The rocket continued to fall forward for what would be a great distance, toward the open semidesert extending southward toward Uzbekistan.

‘No casualties or damage’
Another garbled report also arose, with longer-lasting consequences. “No casualties or environmental damage have been reported,” officials quickly declared — even though they didn't yet know where the rocket, with half its fuel still unburned, had hit the ground. Yuri Nosenko, deputy head of the Federal Space Agency, told reporters at the launch site: “Neither fatalities nor damage have been reported from the site of the crash.”

A couple of hours later, space agency spokesman Igor Panarin said that fragments of the rocket landed around the Kazakh-Uzbek border, and that "no people or settlements in the area where the stages came down were affected.” He was certain of that, apparently, because that’s they way he wanted it to be — and it was a good guess, looking at a map of mostly-empty wasteland.

An aerial search located a fresh explosion crater 93 miles (150 kilometers) south of Baykonur, along the track that radar indicated the rocket’s main body had fallen. Panarin was quick to issue an all-is-well: “According to preliminary reports, all the toxic fuel had burned away while the rocket was falling and there is no fuel leak at the crash site,” he told reporters.

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