The most embarrassing engineering blunder of the year might well be the loss of a Soyuz-2.1b rocket launched last month from the Vostochny cosmodrome.
A Soyuz-2.1a launched from the Vostochny Cosmodrome on 28 April 2016
The Russian rocket had a payload of 18 small satellites which were intended to be used for scientific, commercial and research companies and well as Russias new Meteor-M weather satellite.
Initially, the Russian space agency Roscosmos declared it had simply lost contact with its newly launched satellites.
However, deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin confirmed on Wednesday that the failure was caused by human error.
The rocket launched from the new Vostochny cosmodrome in the far east of Russia. However, the engineering team had programmed the rocket to launch from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmodrome.
The Vostochny spaceport is the first civilian rocket launch site in Russia and is set among the taiga forest of the Amur region.
This is the second major embarrassment for the cosmodrome which was forced to postpone its first rocket launch last year by one day due to a glitch at an event attended by Vladimir Putin.
