The Dnepr booster rocket was meant to carry eighteen foreign satellites into space, the most important cargo aboard being the first Belarusian earth exploration satellite BelKA. Undoubtedly it was a disastrous blow on Minsk’s ambitious satellite projects, as Minsk had everything ready to celebrate the success of BelKA in a grand way. Space centers in the Belarusian capital city were tuned to get the first satellite information. President Alexandr Lukashenka, who came to Baikonur only to witness, as it appeared, the loss of his country’s multimillion dollar satellite, left the launching site in deep frustration without saying a word of comment to inquisitive journalists.

The search group dispatched to the crash site in the Karmakshy district of Kyzylorda region on the Kazakh-Uzbek border area found a 17 meters deep crater caused by disintegrated parts of the rocket, caused by the explosion. Some fragments of the Dnepr were located 190 kilometers away from the launch site. Kazakh authorities, above all, feared the contamination of the crash area by highly toxic heptyl used by Russian rockets as a propellant fuel. The fuel tank of the Dnepr supposedly held 40 tons of the toxic fuel at the moment of the crash. Although environmental experts found no traces of fuel contamination in the area, residents of the Komekbay village complained they had strong headaches and felt nauseous. Experts from the Emergency Ministry of Kazakhstan estimated that several square kilometers of the area were contaminated by toxic fuel, but these allegations were refuted outright by the Russians, who agreed to set up a joint team of experts only on the fifth day after the disaster.

The behavior of the Russian Rosskosmos space agency authorities clearly points to Moscow’s attempt to make the environmental disaster and health hazards from the rocket crash seem insignificant. “It took two and a half hours for Russians to inform the Emergency Ministry of the crash. By that time we had already every details of the disaster” said the deputy emergency minister of Kazakhstan Bolatbek Kuandykov. Russians began the search for the debris of the rocket scattered across the Karmakshy district no sooner than the morning of the following day, while teams of experts from Kazakh Emergency Ministry were sent to the area within one and a half hour.

Whatever will be the result of the joint commission of experts from both sides, which holds its meetings behind closed doors barring journalists from any source of information, the crash of the Dnepr calls to question the benefits of Kazakhstan’s space cooperation with Russia and minimizes confidence in Russian space technology. A spokesman for Roskosmos, Igor Panarin, explained that the catastrophic failure of the Dnepr was triggered by the malfunctioning of the rocket engine. But it should be taken into account that the crash of the 250-ton Dnepr was not the first failure even of this year. In February, the launch of an Arab telecommunications satellite from Baikonur ended in a discouraging disaster. The blast-off of the Kompas-2 scientific satellite designed to forecast earthquakes and launched from a submarine of the Russian North Fleet was likewise an ill-fated adventure. In June, some solar panels of the Kosmos-2421 military satellite launched from Baikonur failed to unfold. With these grim records, Kazakhstan and Belarus have little reason to hope for long-term successful satellite launches using Russian booster rockets.

In 1999 Kazakhstan and Russia, after the repeated crash of Proton rockets on the territory of South Kazakhstan, signed an agreement designed to ensure safe launches and settle the question of compensations for environmental damages. But Roskosmos did not respect the Kazakh demand to remove heptyl-propelled carrier rockets from future launches. In reality, the Kyzylorda region still remains a drop zone for harmful fragments of Russian rockets brought down by technical failures. The last disaster, as reported by the joint commission of experts, caused environmental damage to Kazakhstan estimated at 194 million tenge ($1,500,000).

The Dnepr rocket was converted from the intercontinental ballistic missile RS-20, developed by the Soviet military in 1975 and known in the West as SS-18. The modified version of the rocket is in use as a space launcher in Baikonur since 2004. When Belarusian President Alexandr Lukashenka arrived in Baikonur he was fascinated by the “exceptionally high professional level” of space specialists at the cosmodrome. But the crash of the Dnepr raises strong doubts about the reliability of Russian boosters not only in Belarus, but also in Kazakhstan, where the government has always seen Russia as an unrivalled supplier of space technologies.