by the russkies. http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040629-092339-5598r Russia's Satan soars for peaceful profit By Martin Sieff UPI Senior News Analyst Published 6/29/2004 12:38 PM BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan, June 29 (UPI) -- I saw Satan soar into the heavens as an angel of light Tuesday. And it was carrying three American communications satellites to put into orbit. Just after High Noon Tuesday, I saw the fourth successful launch of the new Russian-Ukrainian Dneper booster from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan in Central Asia. Dneper carried a payload cluster of no fewer than eight satellites -- three U.S. communications ones, three Saudi Arabian communications ones, and two research ones from Italy and France built under the auspices of the European Space Agency. The launch was another low-key, understated triumph, the kind of thing that Baikonur, the very first cosmodrome, or spaceport, in human history has long been famous for. But the officials of Russia's Federal Space Agency had special cause for self-congratulation. Their Dnepr booster, first unveiled in 1999, looks set to be a commercial winner. Four have now been launched successfully. Dnepr's reliability rate is currently 97 percent, and no fewer than 150 more of them are ready to go up during the next six years. For the 100-foot, 210-ton, three-stage launch vehicle has for the last quarter-century been known to U.S. and NATO planners under a very different name. Designated RS-20 by its designers in the old Soviet Union, it was known to NATO by the code-number SS-18 and the code-name Satan. That frightening appellation was not given lightly. For Satan was a crusher of cities and slayer of civilizations. The giant rocket boasted up to 10 Multiple Independently-Targeted Reentry Vehicles, or MIRVs, each of which would have a carried a hydrogen bomb thermonuclear warhead to incinerate a different North American or Western European city. Even more terrifying, some of them were believed to have been fitted with aerosol warheads to spray smallpox virus over their U.S. targets. . . .
