Text of report in English by corporate-owned Russian military news agency Interfax-AVN website
Minsk, 19 June: The implementation of Belarusian space projects should continue, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka said.
“We do not have to be some space superpower, but we will continue our space programme because we now have a good school,” Lukashenka told students of Minsk universities after the groundbreaking ceremony for a students’ campus in Minsk on Thursday [19 June].
We need to continue implementing our plans to create our own remote sensing satellite, the president said. “This satellite will be even better than the one that Russia ruined during launch [BelKA],” he said.
Belarus also plans to open its own Mission Control Centre, Lukashenka said.
The launch of the first Belarusian satellite, BelKA, in July 2006 was a failure, resulting from the crash of the Russian Dnepr rocket shortly after launch from Baykonur. Apart from the Belarusian satellite, 17 other spacecraft were lost in the incident.
Originally published by Interfax-AVN military news agency website, Moscow, in English 1135 19 Jun 08.
(c) 2008 BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
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