Solar-sail spacecraft undetected on planned orbit

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That was followed by over two hours of radio silence as mission organizers, operating from the Planetary Society's bungalow in Pasadena, California, attempted to track the orbiter's expected path across the Pacific and then back over Europe.

Another portable tracking station in the Marshall Islands was also unable to detect the craft's passage about a half hour after takeoff, backers said.

The spacecraft was also not detected by permanent ground tracking stations in Alaska, the Czech Republic or by two stations outside Moscow, they said.

Jim Cantrell, project operations manager for Cosmos 1, said it was possible the Russian missile had put the spacecraft into an orbit that was not the planned trajectory, accounting for the apparent absence of the craft.

"It was not where we told them it would be," he said of the tracking stations. "It was very possible that they did not see it and it went by them."

The project started as a dream held by Planetary Society founders Carl Sagan, the late science fiction writer, Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman, who proposed sending a solar-sail craft to rendezvous with Halley's Comet in the 1970s.