2009 in Spaceflight - Launch Failures

Launch Failures

Four orbital launch failures occurred in 2009. On 24 February, a Taurus-XL launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, United States, with the Orbiting Carbon Observatory. The payload fairing did not separate from the rocket, leaving the upper stage with too much mass to reach orbit. The stage, with spacecraft and fairing still attached, reentered the atmosphere, coming down off the coast of Antarctica. The second failure was a controversial North Korean launch attempt using an Unha rocket to launch the Kwangmyŏngsŏng-2 communications satellite. The launch was conducted on 5 April, and North Korea maintains that it successfully reached orbit, however no objects from the launch were tracked as having orbital velocity, and US radar systems tracking the rocket detected that it failed at around the time of third stage ignition, with debris falling in the Pacific Ocean.

A Soyuz-2.1a suffered a failure during the launch of Meridian 2 on 21 May, due to the premature cutoff of the second core stage of the carrier rocket. The satellite was placed in a lower than planned orbit, which it was initially expected to be able to correct by means of its onboard propulsion system, and the launch was reported to be a partial failure. By the time of the next Meridian launch in 2010 it had been confirmed that the satellite could not correct its own orbit, and that the mission was a failure. On 25 August, the Naro-1 rocket was launched on its maiden flight, however one half of the payload fairing failed to separate, and it did not reach orbit.

On 31 August a Long March 3B placed the Palapa-D satellite into a lower than expected orbit after its third stage gas generator burned through, resulting in an engine failure at the start of the second burn. The satellite was able to raise itself to its correct orbit at the expense of fuel which would have been used for five or six years of operations.