Russian officials punished for botched satellite launch

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has formally reprimanded the chief of his country's national space agency and fired two other high-ranking space officials over the loss of three state-of-the-art navigation satellites in a botched rocket launch earlier this month. The decision, announced by the Kremlin on Wednesday, comes after an investigation into the Dec. 5 launch failure of a Russian-built Proton rocket carrying three new Glonass-M navigation satellites. The satellites never reached orbit. Instead, they plunged back to Earth and crashed in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii. More

(Source: MSNBC - Dec 30)