Launch of Private Rocket Fails; Three Satellites Were Onboard

A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space Saturday night, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire's effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery.

The accident occurred a little more than two minutes after launch, and the two-stage Falcon 1 rocket appeared to be oscillating before the live signal from an on-board video camera went dead.

"We are hearing from the launch control center that there has been an anomaly on that vehicle," said Max Vozoff, a mission manager and launch commentator for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, on a webcast of the event soon afterward.

Elon Musk, an Internet entrepreneur, founded the company, known as SpaceX, in 2002 after selling his online payment company, PayPal, to eBay for $1.5 billion. The company, based in Hawthorne, Calif., has been hailed as one of the most promising examples of an entrepreneurial "new space" movement, and has 525 employees.....

....On this flight, the Falcon carried three small satellites: one, called Trailblazer, for the Department of Defense, which was built as a kind of quick-turnaround demonstration. The two others were for NASA: PRESat, a small automated laboratory, and NanoSail-D, a test of the concept of using sunlight to push a thin solar sail and provide propulsion without propellant.

The rocket was also carrying the ashes of 208 people who had paid to have their remains shot into space, including the astronaut Gordon Cooper and the actor James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, the wily engineer on the original "Star Trek" television series. The service is called an "Explorers Flight" by the company that arranges them, Celestis, Inc. Last night the company's web page stated, "The Explorers Flight mission appears not to have reached orbit tonight," and the Wikipedia pages of Cooper and Doohan had already been edited early Sunday morning to reflect the news.

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