Proton rocket ready for return-to-flight mission

BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW

Posted: September 27, 2014


A Russian Proton rocket is counting down to liftoff Saturday at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the venerable launcher's first flight since a third stage failure doomed a mission in May.

The three-stage booster, topped with a Breeze M upper stage, is set for liftoff at 2023 GMT (4:23 p.m. EDT) Saturday, or 2:23 a.m. local time at the historic space base in Kazakhstan.

The Proton rocket will deploy a secretive Russian military satellite called Luch.

Russia has revealed little about the mission -- also known as Olymp -- other than the spacecraft was built by ISS Reshetnev, a Russian satellite manufacturer.

The satellite is likely heading for geostationary orbit, a 22,300-mile-high perch used by communications satellites, where a spacecraft's orbit matches the speed of Earth's rotation.

Saturday's launch will be the first flight of a Proton rocket since a launch failure in May.

Investigators traced the cause of the May 15 failure to the premature shutdown of the Proton rocket's third stage engine. News reports after the launch blamed the problem on an anomaly in the third stage's steering system.

The Express AM4R communications satellite was lost in the launch mishap.

Russian officials delayed the launch of the Luch satellite four months after the May 15 failure.

The next Proton mission after Saturday is set for Oct. 21 with the Express AM6 satellite, a civilian telecommunications spacecraft for the Russian Satellite Communications Co.

Commercial flights of the Proton rocket, managed by U.S.-based International Launch Services, are scheduled to resume later this year.

The ASTRA 2G communications satellite, owned by SES of Luxembourg, is the next commercial payload on the ILS manifest.

Credit: Roscosmos
 

Credit: Roscosmos
 

Credit: Roscosmos
 

Credit: Roscosmos
 

Credit: Roscosmos
 

Credit: Roscosmos
 

Credit: Roscosmos
 

Credit: Roscosmos
 

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