Ukrainians still remember a shock that in August last the Zenith booster-rocket
failed to respond to ground-station commands, and the twelve Globalstar
satellites it was to have put into orbit "ceased to exist." After this,
the American side of the Globalstar program temporarily refused to have
anything to do with Ukraine. Rossiyskaya gazeta, an official Russian
publication, claims that the blame for the crash of Zenith, the pride of
the Ukrainian space industry, should be put on certain Saratov-based businessmen
who manufactured the chemical sources of electricity in garages, rather
than in laboratories.
The Rossiyskaya gazeta article says that logically the Ukrainian
Pivdenmash (Southern Mechanical Engineering) should have had a leading
research institute and the Lithium Element Company as partners in Saratov.
In reality, the implementation of the Globalstar international project
was assigned to four commercial firms now being criminally indicted by
Saratov regional security service. The Saratov dealers were to deliver
to Dnipropetrovsk the chemical sources of electricity made of substandard
components in car garages with no quality control. The batteries reached
Dnipropetrovsk free of charge, being cleared by customs offices as consumer
goods intended for use at nuclear power plants.
The vigilance of the Russian secret services, which spotted the causes
of the Zenith accident, at first glance deserves the highest praise, if
only it was proved that the Zenith never reached the orbit precisely because
of the faulty batteries. But does the very fact that the world-acclaimed
plant can use the services of dubious firms without controlling the quality
of the units supplied not tarnish the reputation of Pivdenmash management
and its products?
"The information published in Rossiyskaya gazeta has nothing
to do with the true causes of the Zenith accident. We regard this information
as a newspaper hoax," Pivdenmash press service chief Yuri Alekseyenko told
The Day's Vadym RYZHKOV, "The causes of the Zenith booster-rocket
crash have been thoroughly studied by the Ukrainian and Russian parties.
These causes were detected in the course of work of a commission made up
of both Ukrainian and Russian representatives, and listed in an official
document signed by the representatives of both countries." The commission
concluded that "the Zenith-2 booster crashed because of a guidance system
failure caused by the consecutive disconnection of two onboard computer
channels... The No. 3 and No. 2 channels failed due to two isolated faults
in them... Why the two isolated faults occurred remained unsolved, Mr.
Alekseyenko said. "However, there were no complaints about energy supply
to the battery-operated onboard computer."






