Solar Sail Ship Fails To Achieve Orbit

Cosmo 1, the world's first-ever solar sail spacecraft, came tumbling back to Earth Wednesday after its booster failed less than two minutes after launch, Russian officials said.

The Volna booster rocket, fired from a Russian missile submarine in the northern Barents Sea, ceased operations approximately 83 seconds into the flight, according to Russian navy officials.

The spacecraft was touted as a technological breakthrough. The joint US-Russian project was designed to use the sun as a means of propelling the spacecraft in a long, slow acceleration eventually building to great velocities over long distances.

At first, the Planetary Society's co-founder said his organization was receiving signals from the spacecraft.

"It's good news because we are in orbit -- very likely in orbit," Bruce Murray told the Associated Press.

Not long afterwards, however, the Russian space agency officially squelched that notion.

"The booster's failure means that the solar sail vehicle was lost," Russian space agency spokesman Vyacheslav Davidenko said.

FMI: www.planetary.org