Russian satellites crash into Pacific – agencies

MOSCOW, (Reuters) – Three Russian satellites crashed  into the Pacific Ocean today after a failed launch, media  reported, in a setback to a Kremlin project designed as a rival  to widely used U.S. navigation technology.
Russian news agencies reported that the satellites went off  course and crashed near Hawaii after blasting off from Russia’s  Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan.
A spokesman at the space agency Roscosmos could not confirm  media reports but said the satellites had deviated from their  planned course after a Proton-M rocket launcher malfunctioned.
“It was an unplanned situation,” said the spokesman. He  declined to give further details.
Interfax news agency quoted an aerospace industry source as  saying that the carrier veered from course, bringing the upper  part of the rocket with the satellites into an incomplete orbit  and causing them to fall back into the atmosphere.
Roscosmos said it would issue a statement later today.
The satellites were the last of the batch of 24 satellites  at the heart of Russia’s GLONASS, its answer to the U.S. Global  Positioning System (GPS).
Russia has been developing the system since 1976. The state  has spent $2 billion in the last 10 years on the project, and  the system is expected to be fully operational by end of January  2011.