Cosmos-1 May Be Lost In Space

The solar sail craft launched on June 21 into orbit, but has not been detected yet by ground controllers. Moscow, we have a problem. A day after departure, the experimental solar sail craft Cosmos-1 has been mostly silent and difficult to detect by its controllers in Moscow and Pasadena. The craft launched from a Russian submarine in the Barents Sea. Carried aboard a converted ICBM rocket, the solar sail was supposed to be in orbit 500 miles above the Earth. But a failure in the first or second stage rocket may have failed to get the craft into orbit, or it may be in a different orbit than the project team expected. Radio telescopes could take days or weeks to pick up signals from the craft. Project Operations assistant