Proton Launches Suspended Pending Investigation

by Peter Galace

Moscow, Russia, July 19, 2013--Russian officials have suspended all launches of Proton rockets following the July 2 launch failure of a Proton M rocket carrying three GLONASS navigational satellites into space.  The Russian Federal Space Agency, commonly called Roscosmos, announced last week that a Russian State Commission has been established and has started investigating the potential causes of the failure.

Reston, Va-based International Launch Services (ILS), which markets commercially the Proton rocket, will also conduct its own Failure Review Oversight Board (FROB). ILS said the FROB will review the commission’s findings and corrective action plan, in accordance with U.S. and Russian government export control regulations. The FROB will include representatives from ILS customers, insurance underwriters, and technical experts from the industry.

ILS has planned to launch up to four more commercial missions in 2013 — the SES Astra 2E, the Sirius XM Radio FM6, the first of three Inmarsat 5/Global Xpress satellites, and the Turksat 4A spacecraft. These launches are now suspended pending the results of the investigation.

The launch failure on July 2 happened about ten seconds after lift-off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 8:38 a.m. local time. The Proton M/Block DM-3 rocket veered off of its flight path and returned to earth, blowing its payload of three Glonass navigational satellites worth $200 million. The total cost of the disaster, however, is likely to be much higher. There is also the cost of damage to Cosmodrome facilities and to the communities surrounding it, plus the cost of conducting the massive cleanup.

The Proton booster (Stages 1, 2 and 3) was manufactured by Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center (KhSC). S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation (Energia) is the prime contractor for the Block DM-03 upper stage (Stage 4).

Baikonur facility cleanup

Cleanup of the Baikonur facility is underway after the failed launch is believed to have spewed 600 tons of toxic fuel across the launch pad and surrounding areas, raising fears of contamination and further strain in Moscow’s relationship with its former Soviet sister republic. Shortly after the crash, the Cosmodrome was evacuated and the nearest town – Baikonur at 57 km distance – was instructed to shut all windows and turn off air conditioners to avoid intake of contaminated air.

RIA-Novosti news agency reported that a Rocosmos official has said that work at Baikonur is likely to be suspended for two to three months to clean up the fuel dumped across a wide swath around the crash site.

Russia rents the Baikonur facility and its few surrounding villages from Kazakhstan on a lease that expires in 2050.

The Proton-M carrier rocket, derived from the Soviet-developed Proton, is launched from sites 81 and 200 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Commercial launches marketed by ILS generally use Site 200/39. The July 2 launch was not managed by ILS.

Proton was originally developed as a "Super Intercontinental Ballistic Missile" and was mainly a product of the Cold War era. It was designed to launch a 100-megaton (or larger) nuclear warhead over a distance of 13,000 km. But it was hugely oversized for an ICBM, and was never deployed in such a capacity. Eventually, the Russians decided to utilize it as a space launch vehicle.

Modifications were introduced to the lower stages to reduce structural mass, increase thrust, and fully utilize propellants. A closed-loop guidance system was used on the first stage, which allows more complete consumption of propellant. This increased the rocket's performance slightly compared to previous variants, and also reduced the amount of toxic chemicals remaining in the stage when it impacts downrange. Because of the enhancements, the rocket was later called Proton M, which gained the capability to place payloads up to 21 tons (46,000 lb) into low Earth orbit. With an upper stage, it acquired the capability to place a 3-ton payload into geosynchronous orbit, or a 5.5 ton payload into geosynchronous transfer orbit. The Russians also made efforts to reduce dependency on foreign component suppliers.

Proton’s upper stage, known as Block D, was originally developed for the L3 Lunar Expeditionary Complex. This lunar expedition and moonbase was proposed by Valentin Glushko in 1974 as a Soviet response to the United States' Apollo program. Designed for multiple engine firings and multi-day missions in space, Block D was expected to conduct trajectory corrections between the Earth and the Moon, then make a braking maneuver for entering lunar orbit and fire one last time to initiate the initial descent of the manned lander on the lunar surface. Block D upper stage eventually outlived the program for which it had originally been created.

A new modification of the upper stage introduced in 1974, designated Block DM, allowed the Soviet Union to reach geostationary orbit for the first time. Two modified versions of Block D were also introduced: DM2 in 1982 and DM3 in 1996. Launches have also been made with Block-DM upper stages, namely the Block DM-2 when launching Glonass spacecrafts.

The first ILS Proton launch was on 9 April 1996 with the launch of the SES Astra 1F communications satellite. The first Proton-M launch occurred on 7 April 2001. On 7 July 2007, ILS launched the first Proton-M Enhanced rocket, which carried the DirecTV-10 satellite into orbit. The second launch of this variant occurred on 18 August 2008, and was used to place Inmarsat 4 F3 into orbit. The baseline Proton-M was retired in November 2007, in favor of the Enhanced variant. On October 19, 2011 Viasat-1 weighing 6.74 tons was lifted into geostationary transfer orbit by the Proton-M/Briz-M Phase III.

Previous Proton-M rocket failed launches

Before the failed launch on July 2nd, Proton-M rocket had a number of other failed launches. The latest  disaster was the fifth since 2010. In 2007, a Proton-M rocket carrying a Japanese communication satellite did not reach its orbit and crashed. On 5 December 2010, the upper stage and payloads failed to reach orbital velocity due to overloading of the upper stage with 1.5 tons of liquid oxygen, resulting in the loss of, again, three Glonass satellites it was carrying. On August 17, 2011, a Proton-M rocket, with the fiftieth Briz-M upper stage, launched Russia’s Ekspress-AM4 communications satellite. But the Briz-M failed to deploy the Ekspress spacecraft into a geosynchronous transfer orbit after it was reported to have lost all power at the time during – or shortly after – the fourth burn. And then on August 6, 2012, the Proton-M rocket and its payload of two communications satellites -- Russia’s Express MD2 and Indonesia’s Telcom-3 communication satellites -- was lost when it failed to reach the orbit. And last December 8, 2012, the Briz-M upper stage failed again to put Gazprom Space Systems' Yamal-402 into its proper orbit. The Yamal 402 satellite had to use its own power to get itself to the correct oribital position thereby losing a few years of its service life.

As a result of the July 2 launch failure, Arianespace is believed to be luring customers to use, instead, their Ariane 5 rocket, which is Russia’s biggest competitor to its Proton-M for launching satellites in the 6,000-kilogram weight class. Europe’s Arianespace launch consortium, reports say, has indicated its readiness to add one or two Ariane 5 launches to its 2014 manifest if commercial customers make themselves known quickly enough, the Evry, France-based company said July 2.