Last Story

And, for the last story of the night, the revolutionary Cosmos 1 solar sail project isn't looking good.

Despite a jubilant Tuesday launch, the flight of a privately-funded solar sail remains unclear due to a lack of telemetry from the now-silent spacecraft, mission managers said.

"This is not what we'd hoped to have happen," said Bruce Murray, co-founder of the space advocacy group Planetary Society in charge of the mission. "Negative news is not good news."

The Planetary Society's Cosmos 1 spacecraft launched skyward atop a converted Cold War-era intercontinental ballistic missile, shot skyward at about 3:46 p.m. EDT (1946 GMT) from its Russian nuclear submarine launch pad positioned beneath the Barents Sea.

But with some apparently ambiguous telemetry, hints that their solar sail spacecraft and the potential of a launch vehicle anomaly, the actual state of Cosmos 1 is unclear.

An official statement from the Planetary Society stated that, though Cosmos 1 did launch Tuesday, flight controllers "could not confirm a successful orbit injection."

This is very unfortunate, though I could have told them myself that using a converted Russian ballistic missile as a launch vehicle was begging for complete and total failure... You know, sort of like asking Paris Hilton to teach your kids to read?