"We are still coordinating and gathering information about the incident," Slamet Riyadi, head of Corporate Communications and Affairs (HCCS) at Telkom, said.
Jakarta (ANTARA News) - The Telkom-3 satellite owned by Indonesian telecommunication services company Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom) has been reported lost, hours after it was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 2:31 AM Jakarta time on Tuesday.

The company will not be giving detailed information about the incident, Slamet Riyadi, head of Corporate Communications and Affairs (HCCS) at Telkom said.

"We are still coordinating and gathering information about the incident," Slamet told ANTARA News.

The Telkom-3 satellite was carried by a Russian-made Proton-M rocket, along with a Russian Ekspress-MD2 satellite. The Telkom-3 was scheduled to reach the Briz-M upper stage on Tuesday at 11.44 am, and the Express MD2 stage at 12.14 pm Jakarta time.

The Briz-M upper stage involves releasing the rocket's fuel tank along with the relocation of command instruments towards the center. This phase is aimed at mitigating shock loads when an additional propellant tank is being discarded.

Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos refused to confirm the incident in a statement, but said that the satellite was still undetected and that it had run into some trouble at the Briz-M stage during its orbiting journey.

"The Briz-M booster and the two satellites have not been detected in the transition orbit. We have however received a signal from the booster from an interim emergency orbit instead," Roscosmos said in a statement on its website.

The Briz-M fired the satellite's engines at the scheduled time, but they operated for seven seconds, rather than the 18 minutes and five seconds they have been programmed for.

The loss of the Telkom-3 satellite has added to the list of failures encountered during a satellite launch's Britz-M phase. A malfunctioning Briz-M booster had earlier led to the loss of the Express-AM4 telecommunication satellite in August 2011.

The launch of the Indonesian Telkom-3 satellite has been delayed several times. It was earlier scheduled for the middle of 2011, but was postponed until the end of 2012. Before it finally blasted off on Tuesday, the launch had been scheduled for early June.

This is the first time Indonesia has bought a satellite from the Russian company Retshesnev. Its previous Telkom-2 satellite used a France Ariane-5 rocket and was purchased from the ArianeSpace Company in 2005.

It was originally planned to launch the Telkom-3 with a Yamal-300K satellite, while the Ekspress-MD2 was to be launched with an Ekspress-AM8.

In December 2008, Telkom chose ISI Retchesnev, a Russia-based firm, to build and launch the Telkom-3 satellite, at a cost of US $200 million. Telkom and Retchesnev signed the contract in February 2009.(*)

Editor: Heru Purwanto
Copyright © ANTARA 2012