Russian Rocket Carrying A $275 Million Telecommunications Satellite Failed and Burned Up Shortly After Launch

Russian rocket carrying a $275 million telecommunications satellite failed and burned up shortly after launch on Friday, the latest in a series of setbacks for Russia’s once-pioneering space industry.

It was the second failure for Russia’s workhorse Proton-M rocket in less than a year, and the second time that it had failed to deliver a European satellite intended to provide advanced telecoms and Internet access to remote parts of Russia, after the last one crashed shortly after launch in 2011.

Friday’s unmanned mission went awry when the engine on the third stage of the Proton-M booster rocket failed, Oleg Ostapenko, head of the Russian space agence  spoke, He said the precise cause was unknown.

The failure occurred at an altitude of 160 km (100 miles), about nine minutes after the early-morning lift-off from the Russian-leased Baikonur facility in Kazakhstan.

The state-run RIA quoted Ostapenko as saying that the rocket and all debris had burned up in the atmosphere: “We can say with certainty that nothing reached Earth.” However, Russian media said some debris may have fallen into the Pacific or been scattered over Siberia and Russia’s Far East.

No casualties or damage were reported on the ground. The lost Express AM4R satellite, worth more than 200 million euros ($275 million), was described by its maker Astrium, a unit of the European aerospace group Airbus AIR.PA, as one of the most powerful satellites built in Europe. Its loss delays a number of commercial projects by three to four years. “It’s a heavy blow, of course. And the thing is that our workhorse rocket  our most powerful and the most-used rocket  has such a bad record,” Ivan Moiseyev, head of the Russian-based Institute of Space Policy think tank, told Kommersant-FM radio. He said the rocket had a 7 percent failure rate, and its unreliability was making it harder forRussia to compete in the multibillion-dollar global satellite launch industry, giving a boost to its European rival Arianespace and the American newcomer SpaceX. “It’s a very unsuccessful picture on the whole and, if you compare it with our main competitors, with Europe, their last accident was 12 years ago,” Moiseyev said. Last July, three navigation satellites worth about $200 million were lost when the Proton-M rocket crashed near the launch pad shortly after take-off. That accident strained relations between Kazakhstan and Russia and led Kazakhstan to temporarily ban Proton launches from Baikonur. State-run Rossiya-24 television said all launches had been suspended from Kazakhstan after Friday’s failure

#Bring Back our Girls. Nigeria Crisis

The social media rallying cry has generated global attention for nearly 300 girls abducted from their boarding school in Nigeria by Boko Haram militants. But why hasn't more been done to find them? And why did it take so long for the Nigerian government and others to take action? On Friday.

Interviewed Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala live from Abuja, the capital city, where she was attending the World Economic Forum on Africa. Okonjo-Iweala praised business leaders for coming together in support of the missing girls and helping to launch a safe schools initiative.

While she gave her support to Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, she expressed outrage over the situation involving the missing girls. "I have a daughter, I have four children.It's unacceptable and unimaginable," she said. Her own mother was kidnapped and released after five days in 2012. Joining Couric in New York was Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who wrote an influential column about the missing girls last Sunday.

The greatest threat to militancy in the long run comes not from drones but from girls with schoolbooks," he wrote. He echoed that sentiment with Couric.

The government is responsible for protecting its students. The biggest treasure isn't oil, it's children." Also interviewed from Abuja was human rights activist Hafsat Abiola, who criticized her government's ineffectual efforts to find the girls. "We don't want to listen to explanations. We want to see results and our girls come home," she said. Abiola knows first hand about the violence that has plagued Nigeria over the years. Her father was elected president of Nigeria in 1993 but was jailed by the military before taking office.

He later died in prison. Abiola's mother was killed during a demonstration for her husband in 1996. As the conversation circled back to the global social media movement, Couric brought in filmmaker and activist Ramaa Mosley, who has played an integral role in spreading #BringBackOurGirls around the world. "I've been seeing it as an SOS to the world," Mosley said. Though the slogan was originally generated in Nigeria, Mosley's initiative to spread the hashtag has been credited with sparking international outrage over the girls' abduction and the slow response by the Nigerian government and the international community.