The Kremlin Wednesday announced that the chief of Russia's Federal Space Agency - also called Roscosmos - has been formally reprimanded by the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who has also fired two other high-ranking space officials. The move results from December 5 launch failure of the country's Proton rocket that was hauling three new Glonass-M navigation satellites.

The three state-of-the-art navigation satellites, rather than reaching the orbit, plunged back to Earth and crashed in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii. After the failure of the Proton rocket's launch, Russian investigators said that the cause of the failure was the overfueling blunder.

As per the Kremlin statement, it was after receiving the report on the launch failure probe that Medvedev issued an official reprimand to the Roscosmos chief Anatoly Perminov; and fired the deputy chief of Roscosmos, Viktor Remishevsky; as well as Vyacheslav Filin, VP and deputy chief of the rocket manufacturer, RSC Energia.

Noting that the two space officials were fired because of the "errors made in the calculations for refueling the vehicle's Block DM-3 upper stage," the statement said: "Roscosmos will take additional measures to reinforce disciplinary measures."

Quite like the US global positioning system satellites, the Russian Glonass-M satellites perform a navigation service to the civilian and military customers in Russia. According to the satellite fleet manufacturer Information Satellite Systems Reshetnev, the satellites, weighing slightly more than 3,000 pounds each at launch; and can last around seven years in orbit.