Moscow, Dec. 29: The Russian President, Mr Dmitry Medvedev, on Wednesday fired two top space officials and reprimanded the space agency chief after a launch failure caused Russia to delay the deployment of its own navigation system.
This month’s failed launch of three Glonass-M orbiters marked a humiliating setback to the country’s efforts to introduce a global rival to the US Global Positioning System (GPS).
A presidential statement said Energia Vice President, Mr Vyacheslav Filin and Roskosmos deputy head, Mr Viktor Remishevsky, had been fired for “the mistakes made in the fuel calculations”.
The Russian Proton-M rocket proved too heavy to reach its initial orbit during the December 5 launch and was forced to dump the three high-tech Glonass-M satellites near the Hawaii Islands.
The statement said Mr Medvedev had also reprimanded Roskosmos chief, Mr Anatoly Perminov.
“On the Russian President’s instructions, Roskosmos will undertake additional measures to improve its performance,” the Kremlin statement said. The satellites would have completed a system whose research had been started by the Soviet Union in 1976 before being interrupted and then picked up again by the country’s president-turned premier Vladimir Putin.