SHOTLIST 1. Wide shot pan of the space mission control room 2. Close up of screen 3. Space mission official watching computer monitor 4. Animation of satellite launch 5. Close up zoom in from expert to the scene of the satellite launch 6. Mid shot of mission control executives watching monitor 7. Pan from launch headquarters to executives 8. Close up experts watching computer wall screen 9. Wide shot pan of launch headquarters officers 10. Close up of woman. 11. Close up of male expert 12. Set up shot of Louis Friedman 13. Cutaway of PC monitor screen 14. SOUNDBITE (English) Louis Friedman, executive director of The US Planetary Society "If it did fail that would certainly be embarrassing because we had a failure before related to the launch vehicle. But I don't want to hypothesise yet on what it means because I don't know yet what really happened". 15. Mid shot of experts at the computer monitor 16. Wide shot of experts STORYLINE A Russian attempt to launch a solar sail vehicle designed to be propelled by pressure from sunlight has failed again because the booster rocket suffered engine failure soon after it blasted into space, the state news agency RIA-Novosti reported. The launch was part of a joint Russian-U.S project attempting the first controlled flight of a solar sail. An unnamed official in Russia's Northern Fleet told the news agency early Wednesday that the engine failure occurred 83 seconds after the launch from a submerged Russian submarine in the northern Barents Sea at 1946 GMT on Tuesday. A spokeswoman for the Lavochkin institute involved in the project, told The Associated Press she could not confirm the information but said that if the engine had failed then the vehicle would have fallen back to Earth. Past attempts to unfold similar devices in space have failed. In 1999, Russia attempted a similar experiment with a sun-reflecting device, but the deployment mechanism jammed and the device burned up in the atmosphere. In 2001, Russia launched another such experiment, but the device failed to separate from the booster. The project involved Russia's Lavochkin research production institute and was financed by an organisation affiliated to the U.S. Planetary Society. During the first 45 minutes after launch, in two stages the solar sail was to have separated from the booster and then an engine still powering the device. But space officials lost all signals from the spacecraft. The spacecraft, called "Solar Sail", weighs about 110 kilograms (242 pounds) and is designed to go into an orbit more than 800 kilometres (500 miles) high. It is designed to be powered by eight 49.5-foot-long (15.1-meter-long) sail structures resembling the blades of a windmill. Each blade can be turned to reflect sunlight in different directions so that the craft can tack, much like a sailboat in the wind. The aim is for streams of solar energy particles to push a giant, reflecting sail through space the way wind propels sailboats across water. Solar sails are envisioned as a potential means for achieving interstellar flight in the future, allowing such spacecraft to gradually build up great velocity and cover large distances. Space-sail technology is something that existed solely in science-fiction novels a decade ago. Yet the reflective solar sail could power missions to the sun and beyond within a decade and NASA has invested about US$30 million in this field. You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/e4c54fd3b2cce8b76fd5320e1a5ba44e Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork

• published: 21 Jul 2015
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