Russian military satellites orbited by stripped-down Soyuz rocket

A Russian satellite reportedly designed to demonstrate sensors to track enemy submarines and a passive secondary spacecraft to help calibrate ground-based military radars lifted off Saturday aboard a modified Soyuz rocket, but one of the payloads apparently failed to deploy from the launcher’s upper stage, according to Russian media. The Soyuz 2-1v rocket launched at 1409 GMT (9:09 a.m. EST) Saturday from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, heading north from the snow-covered space base for an orbit circling over Earth’s poles. More

(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Dec 6)