Yantar (satellite)

Kosmos 2175, a Yantar-4K2 or Kobalt spacecraft, was the first satellite to be launched by the Russian Federation following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The first of these was on May 15, 1996 when an attempted launch of a 1KFT (Kometa) at Baikonur's LC-31 failed 50 seconds after liftoff when the payload fairing disintegrated.

The satellite was destroyed by aerodynamic forces, but the booster continued to fly until T+126 seconds when it began to drift off its flight path, leading to an automatic shutdown command.

This time the onboard destruct system on the satellite activated and destroyed it, after which ground controllers sent a manual shutdown command to the booster, which crashed 4 miles (6 kilometers) from the pad.

The back-to-back failures were traced to a manufacturing defect in the payload shrouds, which were produced in a batch, and they left Russia's ability to perform military reconnaissance severely hampered.

[5][6] The special equipment module was the part that returned to earth at the end of the mission, and contained the Zhemchug-4 (pearl) camera.