The Planetary Society insists they will try again. The dream of sailing on particles from the Sun did not die with the rocket booster failure. Even more bizarre, another rocket launched the same day as Cosmos 1 from the Russian northern test range at Plesetsk, carrying a payload called Kosmos (with a K, not a C), also failed during first stage flight. Several years earlier, the same type of booster had doomed the first suborbital solar sail test when the spacecraft had not separated from the main rocket. Cosmos 1 and the entire rocket had plunged back into the Barents Sea, lost for eternity. In the end, the Russians finally announced that the booster had failed at 83 seconds into the launch. Nothing from the Marshall Islands a half an orbit later, nothing from the Czech Republic or Moscow stations that should have had better, stronger communications. Just because a signal from Cosmos 1 was not received at that time was nothing to be concerned about-yet. We had been told not to expect much from these portable stations. Small, portable tracking stations did not pick up signals as hoped, but the station on the Kamchatka Peninsula did pick up the Doppler shift of the rocket just as it should have before losing data. Cheers erupted in Moscow and Pasadena as the word came in, then no more words for a long, long time. Popping into the air, the engine ignited and the missile that had once been loaded with a nuclear warhead aimed at the heart of the United States, leapt toward space carrying a test flight that could usher in a new age of exploration. The Volna burst from its underwater silo, riding a giant air bubble to the surface. Now, another private project was waiting to literally unfurl. In Pasadena, it was 12:46 pm, just past noon, one year to the day after Burt Rutan and his team from Scaled Composites proved private spaceflight was feasible. Large, puffy clouds were overhead, but the submarine crew saw none of this below the black waves. Even this late at night, the sky was light from the polar summer. It was 11:46 pm in the far north of the Barents Sea. The looked for responses from Ann Druyan, her children Sam and Sasha, Bill Nye-the Science Guy, and even celebrity Kirsten Dunst (a good friend of Sasha's and fellow supporter of space exploration). Inside the living room of the main house, reporters crowded together, stifling in the heat of pressed bodies and still air, watching the small computer speakers for word from Friedman. A telephone hookup connected Pasadena with Moscow where Louis Friedman, Executive Director of the society waited for word from the submarine. At the Planetary Society headquarters in Pasadena, mission control consisted of several computer stations in the loft of an old barn in back of the main house. The craft had been integrated with a Volna rocket and loaded aboard the submarine Borisoglebsk, which was on station 30 feet below the cold surface of the Barents Sea. Hopes had been riding high for Cosmos 1 as the launch date of June 21st drew near.
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