Foreign Sabotage Suspected in Phobos-Grunt Meltdown

Source: The Register
Brid-Aine Parnell

Russian space chief doesn't want to point any fingers, but...

The head of the Russian space agency has hinted that foreign sabotage might be to blame for the malfunction of the country's Martian space probe, Phobos-Grunt.

Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin told Russian newspaper Izvestia (in Russian, translation by Google Translate) that he had no complete explanation for the frequent failures of the agency's space projects, but he suggested Russia might not be entirely to blame.

"Today there is no clarity, why the propulsion unit onboard Phobos-Grunt failed to start," he said.

"It is also unclear, why our satellites often have failures at the time when they fly out of range [of Russian mission control] where we don't see the vehicle and do not receive telemetry from it. I don’t want to make any accusations, but today there is powerful equipment to influence spacecrafts, and the possibility of their use should not be ruled out,” he added.