The flight of the carrier rocket “proton-M” with the upper stage “breeze-M” and American spacecraft “ekostar-21” took place from the Baikonur cosmodrome today at 06:45 Moscow time.
The representative of “Roscosmos” in an interview with RIA “Novosti” noted that the launch of the rocket took place successfully and without comment. The separation of the upper stage from launch at the estimated time.
Satellite ekostar-21 will join the group of orbiters designed to provide communication services in Europe. The separation of the space vehicle ekostar-21 is scheduled at 15:58 Moscow time.
The ninth of June 2016, when output to orbit the Intelsat-31 had problems in the second stage engine shut down early, but thanks to emergency intervention of the operators of the satellite has been delivered into orbit.
Later it turned out that at the Voronezh mechanical plant for the soldering of components used is not appropriate documentation, the solder is caused failures in the engines. In March 2017 all defective engines RD-0210/0211 and RD-0213/0214 was recalled to the plant for Troubleshooting. For repair and sent the engines RD-0110 — one of them became a cause of accident of the carrier rocket “Soyuz-U”, which was lost with the cargo ship “Progress MC-04”.
Rocket “proton-M” was launched after a year of inactivity
Vyacheslav Larionov