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Russian Spy Services Defend Zenith, Blame Pivdenmash

13 July, 00:00

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."

Newspaper output №:

№26, (1999)

Section

Day After Day