By IANS/RIA Novosti,
Moscow : Kazakhstan has no plans to ban launches of Russian rockets from its space centre in Baikonur after an accident with Progress M-12M space freighter, the head of the Kazakh space agency has said.
Talgat Musabayev, head of Kazcosmos, said it was not right to immediately ban the launches as the rockets were being successfully launched already for more than 40 years.
The space freighter failed to separate from the third stage of the Soyuz-U carrier rocket on the 325th second of the flight.
The Soyuz-U carrier rocket had blasted off Aug 25 from the Baikonur Space Centre. It, however, crashed and the wreckage fell in South Siberia’s Altai Republic. No casualties or any damage have been reported.
Musabayev said the spacecraft was already far away from Kazakhstan.
“This is the first failure out of 136 launches. It is an eco-friendly rocket. The accident has not done any harm to Kazakhstan,” he said.
Musabayev ruled out any possibility that parts of the rocket might have fallen on Kazakhstan territory.
This was the second spacecraft loss for the Russian space industry. On Aug 18, the Express AM-4 telecommunications satellite failed to separate from the Proton-M carrier rocket and could not reach the designated orbit.