Solar Sail Fails to Reach Orbit  by Paul Gilster on June 22,
2005  Cosmos 1 depictedThe Planetary Society’s servers were
slammed yesterday through the launch and aftermath of the Cosmos
1 mission, but the entries again available on Emily Lakdawalla’s
more or less official weblog make for grim reading this morning.
For that matter, so does the silence that follows her post at
1915 EDT last night, saying that the search continued for Cosmos
1, but the ground stations that expected to receive the
spacecraft’s signal have come up empty.  True, some signals have
been detected, but are they the right ones? Project director
Louis Friedman puts it this way: “That the weak signals were
recorded at the expected times of spacecraft passes over the
ground stations is encouraging, but in no way are they
conclusive enough for us to be sure that they came from Cosmos 1
working in orbit.” The Russian space agency indicated that the
Volna rocket may have had a problem during its first or second
stage firing. “This,” Friedman