Kremlin says Russian satellite launch failures being investigated

MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin said on Thursday that Russia was analyzing its space sector after two failed satellite launches in as many months.

A spokeswoman for Russia’s space corporation Energiya confirmed on Thursday that Moscow had lost contact with Angola’s first national telecoms satellite, AngoSat-1, which was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome on Tuesday.

That followed an incident last month when Russia lost contact with a newly-launched weather satellite – the Meteor-M – after it blasted off from the new Vostochny cosmodrome in the Far East.

“The situation is being analyzed,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with reporters, when asked if structural changes in Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, might be needed.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, in charge of the space industry, said on Wednesday that November’s failed launch of the 2.6 billion-rouble ($44.95 million) weather satellite was due to an embarrassing programming error.