spacetoday.net: Russia postpones GLONASS launch

Posted: Thu, Feb 24, 2011, 7:34 AM ET (1234 GMT)
Unspecified technical reasons have postponed the launch of a Russian navigation satellite for 24 hours. A Soyuz-2.1 was scheduled to launch at 10:15 pm EST Wednesday (0315 GMT, 6:15 am Moscow time) from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia and place a GLONASS-K navigation satellite into orbit. That launch has been rescheduled to Friday because of "technical reasons", without elaborating. The launch would be the first for the GLONASS system since three such satellites were lost in a Proton launch failure in December. Russia is working to fully reconstitute its GLONASS satellite constellation, its version of the American GPS satellite navigation system.