The lift-off of a Russian Proton-M launch vehicle with a Norwegian communication satellite from Baikonur was shifted on by one day, Itar-Tass learnt at the southern Cosmodrome on Sunday. “The fire-off of the Proton-M launch vehicle with the Norwegian telecom satellite T-2R from Baikonur, scheduled for Sunday at 14.33, was shifted on by one day for technical reasons,” a source specified. “According to preliminary data, the shift is attributed to problems that popped up in the land equipment of the launching complex.” Tor-2R was developed on orders of the Norwegian company Telenor Satellite Broadcasting (TSB) and is designed to offer space communication services to subscribers in European countries. There was a definite confusion with the name of the spacecraft back before the launch. The Khrunichev space centre explained that “all contract documents registered it as Tor-2R, but in February 2007, TSB decided to rename it as Tor-5. TSB explained that “the name Tor also has a double origin from the name of Tor – the Norwegian god of Thunder and from the name of well-known Norwegian traveler Thor Heyerdahl. The satellite's weight – 1,960 kilos. It will take a working point in orbit one degree western longitude. The guaranteed service life in geostationary orbit – 15 years. The Federal Space Agency reported that ”following the carrier's launching, its first stage and the head cone will drop in the Karaganda Region, Kazakhstan, the second stage – in the Altai Republic, Russian Federation, and the third – in the Pacific”. The Proton-M launch vehicle is a three-stage liquid carrier. Its launching weight – 700 tonnes. Proton carriers are sold on the world market by the Russian-American company International Launch Services (ILS). Russia in the company is represented by the Khrunichev centre and the Energia Space Corporation. The coming launching for ILS will be the first in the current year and 44th in general. The peculiar feature of the launch is that Proton will fire off into space, for first time, the American Star-2 platform, on the basis of which the satellite was manufactured.
