UPDATED: Whoa! Russian rocket crashes and explodes moments after lift-off today

Things have been travelling swimmingly in the field of spaceflight for a little while now, with even the Russians having a string of flawless launches, and the odd technical glitches not impeding the prime purpose of a few missions.

Until today, when this happened, just a few minutes ago:



The coverage of this launch was really dodgy, no sound, and I couldn't get it to play where I am at all. So no surprise when it dropped out bang on the launch moment, which is why the footage in this clip freezes at that point.
The Proton-M mission was to place three Glonass-M global positioning satellites into orbit, as Russia builds their own equivalent of the US GPS network.

There's a discussion thread on NASA Spaceflight that's worth a read and to check out the many screen grabs from people who were able to get the feed:

And the impact was huge—very close to the launchpad, where engineers were seen to be seconds after the launch. Hopefully they are all OK, but the coverage was cut after the impact so there's no way of knowing yet. Apparently the impact was closer to another of the launchpads at the site.

It's been a very long time since there's been a first-stage failure like this, with no self-destruct issued.

GIF via http://vidorbital.tumblr.com/post/54396074964/massive-and-explosive-launch-failure-of-a-proton-m

More to come when to hand.

Apparently engine cutoff is blocked for the first 45 seconds after launch to ensure clearance of the pad, hence preventing a self-destruct order. Seems no-one was hurt, but there are now concerns that the toxic fumes are blowing towards the Baikonur city.

UPDATE 3 July 2013

According to Space.com the three satellites were insured for their full cost—about USD182 million.

And here's a list of the trouble-plagued history of the Proton rockets, reaching right back to 1966, and including eight failures of the current model Proton-M. Thankfully, the Soyuz spacecraft used by both Russia and the US for getting astronauts to and from the International Space Station are proving far more reliable than the Protons!

To wrap up this post for now, this incredible video of the catastrophic launch has been posted by a Russian (or Kazakhstan?) observer has been posted on YouTube by TheMrSuslov:


And that, folks, is why they don't let you closer to launches... :-/