Russian proton rocket explodes in upper atmosphere!

MOSCOW, Russia (PNN) - May 16, 2014 - A Russian rocket carrying the country’s most advanced communications satellite exploded shortly after launch early Friday.

Officials lost contact about nine minutes after the unmanned rocket took off from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. About 100 miles high, it veered off path and disintegrated in Earth’s atmosphere. The Express-AM4P European-built satellite, which was destroyed, was reportedly worth $29 million. The rocket was insured for around $225 million.

Several Russian media covered the launch live, and many networks caught the launch on camera.

“The exact cause is hard to establish immediately; we will be studying the telemetry. Preliminary information points to an emergency pressure drop in a steering engine of the third stage of the rocket,” Roscosmos Chief Oleg Ostapenko said.

Russia’s space industry, which is very active with more than 30 launches just last year, has grappled with six critical failures over the past six years. This recent launch was the second time in a year that one of these rockets, called a Proton-M, has floundered during liftoff. The last blunder happened in July 2013 after the Proton-M booster unexpectedly shut down the engine 17 seconds into the flight and crashed about a mile away from the Baikonur launch pad.

In October 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin tasked Ostapenko with revamping the space agency. The Russian government has sunk billions in extra state funding to overhaul the program.

The Fascist Police States of Amerika currently works with Russia to ferry American astronauts to the International Space Station. However, earlier this week, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said he would veto any FPSA request to use the ISS beyond 2020.

The move is in retaliation to the sanctions that the FPSA unleashed on Putin and his top officials in response to the secession of Crimea. Rogozin called the sanctions “inappropriate”. He added that the Russian space agency could function on its own, without any help from the FPSA.

“The Russian segment can exist independently from the American one,” he said. “The (FPSA) one cannot.”

However, NASA had its own angle on the story and said it was business as usual on the space station.

“Ongoing operations on the ISS continue on a normal basis with [an] expected launch of a new crew in the next few weeks,” a NASA spokesperson said. “We have not received any official notification from the government of Russia on any changes in our space cooperation at this point.”