Solar-sail vehicle lost after launch

An attempt to launch the world’s first solar sail spacecraft fizzled when a booster rocket failed less than two minutes after liftoff, Russian and U.S. space officials said Wednesday.

The Cosmos 1 vehicle, a joint Russian-American project, was intended to show that a solar sail can make a controlled flight. Solar sails are envisioned as a potential means for achieving interstellar flight, allowing spacecraft to gradually build up great velocity and cover large distances.

But the Volna booster rocket failed 83 seconds after its Tuesday launch from a Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea, the Russian space agency said.

“The booster’s failure means that the solar sail vehicle was lost,” spokesman Vyacheslav Davidenko told The Associated Press. “The Russian navy is searching the area for the debris of the booster and the vehicle.”

A spokesman for the U.S. Strategic Command, Air Force Capt. Jeff Jones, told MSNBC.com on Wednesday that the Air Force Space Command's worldwide radar net had picked up no trace of the Cosmos 1 payload.

In the hours after the launch, mission managers at the California-based Planetary Society were still holding out hope that some monitoring stations had picked up faint signals from the $4 million spacecraft and that the craft had made it to orbit. Later, the society conceded in a statement that if the rocket failed during first-stage firing, then “this would mean that Cosmos 1 is lost.”

Nevertheless, mission managers said they would keep checking the tracking data — and they urged amateur skywatchers to keep looking as well. In a series of Internet postings, satellite-spotters reported seeing no sign of the craft.

Davidenko dismissed suggestions that the spacecraft might have reached orbit as “wishful thinking.”

“The failure of the first stage engine of the three-stage booster rocket has left no chance for the vehicle to reach orbit,” he told the AP, adding that fragments of the booster and the vehicle crashed into the sea.

A Russian government panel will investigate the failure, Davidenko said.

The solar sail vehicle weighed about 240 pounds (110 kilograms) and was designed to go into an orbit more than 500 miles (800 kilometers) high. It was designed to be powered by eight 50-foot-long sail (15-meter-long) structures resembling the blades of a windmill.

Each blade had been designed to turn to reflect sunlight in different directions so that the craft could “tack,” much like a sailboat in the wind.

The privately funded project was organized by the Planetary Society, which counts the late astronomer Carl Sagan as one of its founders. Funding came largely from Cosmos Studios, a science-based entertainment company that was founded by Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan. Russia’s Lavochkin research production institute built the vehicle.

Lidiya Avdeyeva, a spokeswoman for the Lavochkin institute, said she could not comment on the failed launch because the Russian military officials who oversaw it had yet to provide technical details.

Lavochkin, a premier manufacturer of space probes that made interplanetary forays in the heyday of the Soviet space program, has struggled to survive after generous state funding withered following the 1991 Soviet collapse.

MORE FROM SPACE

Space Section Front

Water discovery fuels hope to colonize moon ‘Significant amount’ of water found on moon Get the most from a promising meteor show NASA counts down to space shuttle launch World not ending in 2012, says NASA Cosmic Log: Marvelous view ... and a mystery Broken urine recycler may affect space mission Stuck Mars rover gets set to attempt great escape New research module arrives at space station   Month in space: What a blast! Space Section Front   Add Space headlines to your news reader: