Russia suffers new rocket failure

RUSSIA'S space pride suffered another blow when a booster rocket failed to place two satellites into target orbits.
The mishap came a day after NASA successfully landed a robotic vehicle on Mars.
Russia's Roscosmos space agency said the Proton-M rocket was launched just before midnight Monday from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The booster's first stages worked fine, but the upper stage intended to give the final push to the communication satellites switched off prematurely.

The agency said that the engine's malfunction stranded the Russian Express MD-2 and Indonesia's Telkom-3 satellites in a low orbit where they can't be recovered.
"The satellites can be considered lost," Roscosmos spokeswoman Anna Vedishcheva said on Rossiya television.