A Russian satellite on Friday crashed into Siberia minutes after its launch due to rocket failure, the defence ministry said, in the latest humiliating setback for Russia's embattled space programme. The failure of the Soyuz-2.1B rocket - a member of the same family that Russia uses to send humans to space - comes after a supply ship bound for the International Space Station (ISS) carried by a Soyuz crashed into Siberia in August.
"The satellite failed to go into its orbit. A state commission will investigate the causes of the accident," the spokesman of Russia's space forces Alexei Zolotukhin told the Interfax news agency. He said the problem occurred around seven minutes after the launch of the Meridian communications satellite on the Soyuz rocket from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia due to a third stage rocket failure.
"What happened today confirms that the (space) sector is in crisis," the head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, Vladimir Popofkin, told the ITAR-TASS news agency. Popofkin's predecessor Anatoly Perminov was sacked in April after a series of setbacks, notably a highly embarrassing failure in December 2010 when three navigation satellites for the new Russian Glonass system crashed into the ocean off Hawaii instead of reaching orbit. The recent problems are particularly painful for Russia as it is marks half a century since Yuri Gagarin made man's first voyage into space.