Angara rocket general designer to head Proton inquiry commission
GORKI. May 18 (Interfax) - The Angara carrier rocket general designer will head an interagency commission that will probe the recent Proton-M disaster, said Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.
"We must have an independent view on what is happening at all enterprises involved in the cooperation project, including at the Khrunichev Center," Rogozin said at Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's meeting with his deputies.
He said that the problem will be investigated by an interagency commission, not an ordinary commission, and it will be led by chief of the federal space agency Roscosmos Igor Komarov.
Rogozin said that the accident "was an exact replica of what happened in 1988 and in 2014." "The same system malfunctioned within the engine in the third stage of the Proton carrier rocket, manufactured by the Automatics Design Bureau in Voronezh," Rogozin said.
"Two commissions worked on this problem in the Soviet time and a year ago. The circumstances of the accidents were thoroughly studied and conclusions were made. But here were confronted with another setback," he said.
"By all accounts, the problem is to be found in some design flaw or a technological error which causes the engine to malfunction in certain circumstances," he said.
"Therefore, we will probably have to do more meticulous and very hard work," Rogozin said.
