Earth Imaging Satellite Lost Soon After Launch

A satellite designed to make the world’s highest resolution commercial images of Earth disappeared Tuesday after its launch from California.

Contact with the spacecraft ended about eight minutes after liftoff, as planned, but it failed to reestablish contact as expected later in the flight, mission officials said.

An Athena II rocket carrying the Ikonos 1 satellite lifted off at 11:22 a.m. from Vandenberg Air Force Base, near Lompoc.

Telemetry was received from the first three stages of the Lockheed Martin-built Athena and from a device called the orbital adjust module on the final stage.

The launch, including a “coast phase” between engine firings, was to have taken 90 minutes before Ikonos 1 reached its intended 400-mile-high, near-polar orbit.

Officials could not say whether the spacecraft was still in orbit.

John Copple, chief executive officer of Space Imaging, the Denver company that was going to operate the satellite, said the satellite, launch and other mission assets were insured, but he would not release cost figures.

Space Imaging has a spare Ikonos already built.

Ikonos 1, intended to profit from a growing market for detailed images of Earth’s surface, carried a camera capable of resolving objects 3 feet square.

The pictures would be useful for urban planning, environmental monitoring, mapping, assessing the scope of natural disasters, oil and gas exploration, monitoring farmland and planning communication networks, among other things, according to Space Imaging.

The satellite was built by Lockheed Martin Commercial Space Systems of Sunnyvale, Calif. Raytheon Co. of Garland, Texas, built the communications, image processing and other elements of the system.