29 December 2010
Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev has fired two top space officials and reprimanded it's space agency chief.
The deputy head of the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos, Viktor Remishevsky has been dismissed and it's chief Anatoly Perminov reprimanded.
Vyacheslav Filin, the deputy president of the space rocket corporation Energia has also been sacked.
The decisions comes after an inquiry showed that Russian satellites were lost because of a fuel miscalculation.
Probe
The failed launch occurred when the Russian Proton-M rocket, carrying three Glonass-M satellites, blasted off from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 5 December, 2010.
The rocket, however, failed to reach orbit and so the high-tech satellites were disposed of into the Pacific ocean off the US state of Hawaii.
President Medvedev immediately ordered a probe into the accident and a government commission concluded that it was caused by a fuel miscalculation that essentially made the rocket too heavy to reach orbit.
The Kremlin say it was the findings from the inquiry that moved Mr. Medvedev to make the changes.
Russia has struggled to place a sufficient number of Glonass satellites in orbit to compete with the United States.
The latest incident marks an embarrassing setback for the country's much-publicised attempts to introduce a global rival to the US Global Positioning System (GPS), a programme that was first begun by the Soviet Union in 1976.
Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev has fired two top space officials and reprimanded it's space agency chief.
The deputy head of the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos, Viktor Remishevsky has been dismissed and it's chief Anatoly Perminov reprimanded.
Vyacheslav Filin, the deputy president of the space rocket corporation Energia has also been sacked.
The decisions comes after an inquiry showed that Russian satellites were lost because of a fuel miscalculation.
Probe
The failed launch occurred when the Russian Proton-M rocket, carrying three Glonass-M satellites, blasted off from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 5 December, 2010.
The rocket, however, failed to reach orbit and so the high-tech satellites were disposed of into the Pacific ocean off the US state of Hawaii.
President Medvedev immediately ordered a probe into the accident and a government commission concluded that it was caused by a fuel miscalculation that essentially made the rocket too heavy to reach orbit.
The Kremlin say it was the findings from the inquiry that moved Mr. Medvedev to make the changes.
Russia has struggled to place a sufficient number of Glonass satellites in orbit to compete with the United States.
The latest incident marks an embarrassing setback for the country's much-publicised attempts to introduce a global rival to the US Global Positioning System (GPS), a programme that was first begun by the Soviet Union in 1976.