Sea Launch delays UAE satellite launch to Saturday

OSLO, Norway (Reuters) -- The Boeing-led Sea Launch consortium has delayed the launch of a United Arab Emirates communications satellite for a second day until Saturday, Anglo-Norwegian engineering group Kvaerner said on Friday.

"It's been put off by another 24 hours, and the problem is in the same instrumentation," Kvaerner spokeswoman Marit Ytreeide told Reuters. Kvaerner has a 20 percent stake in the project.

The satellite would be launched from a converted oil platform in the Pacific Ocean on Saturday.

The delays, from an original launch date of Thursday, was prompted by a fault in the Zenit-3SL rocket booster, built by Ukraine's Yuzhnoye rocket design bureau, which is to carry the satellite into orbit.

Sea Launch, whose partners also include Russia's Energia spacecraft builder, has carried out two successful commercial launches but suffered a failure in March when a rocket exploded.

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