A Russian Proton DM booster operated by ILS International Launch Services carried AT&T's Telstar 5 communications satellite into orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, on 24 May. It was the Ìrst flight of the booster since the failure of the Proton launch of the Mars '96 probe on 17 November, 1996, when the vehicle's fourth stage failed to restart.
The $75 million launch of the Space Systems/Loral Telstar 5 will be followed by seven Proton flights this year, carrying 14 Motorola Iridium satellites on two missions, the PanAmsat 5, two Astra spacecraft on two launches, the MCI/SKY 1, and the Asiasat 3.
Lockheed Martin-led US-Russian ILS is investing $100 million at Baikonur to build a new Proton launch pad, allowing it to make eight commercial launches a year from the Kazakhstan base.
The Proton launch came four days after a two-stage Russian-Ukrainian Zenit medium-lift booster, carrying a Cosmos military satellite, crashed to Earth 28km (15nm) from Baikonur after its first-stage engines failed 48s into the flight, at an altitude of 49,000ft (15,000m).
It was the seventh failure in 28 launches for the Zenit, which was first launched in 1985. There will be no further Zenit launches until after an official enquiry.
The 57m-long, 460t, booster, equipped with a Proton third stage, is being used for the Boeing-led international commercial Sea Launch project, which will dispatch satellites into geostationary-transfer orbit from an offshore platform in the Pacific, starting by October 1998.
The Sea Launch commercial-satellite launch platform has left the Kvaerner shipyard in Stavanger, Norway, travelling under its own power to the Russian port of Vyborg, where it will be fitted out with space-systems monitoring equipment. It will sail to Sea Launch's Long Beach base in California, around April 1998.
The first launch will be of the Galaxy II, a Hughes Electronics satellite. The satellite is the first of Hughes' new high-power HS702 units and will be launched from a point on the equator 1,650km south of Hawaii. Sea Launch has bookings for 15 launches.
McDonnell Douglas successfully launched the Hughes HS-376 spin-stabilised Thor 2 communications satellite from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 20 May - the first Delta launch from the Cape since the explosion of a Delta 2 carrying a global-positioning-system satellite on 17 January.
Norway's Telenor ordered a Thor 3 satellite from Hughes after the launch.
Source: Flight International
