There’s a lot riding on the upcoming ISC Kosmotras Dnepr blastoff - for many reasons.

The silo-launched booster-for-hire is set to depart the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan late evening on Monday, March 26, U.S. west coast time.

There will be 26 spacecraft - count ‘em - 26 spacecraft on this cluster launch, with the primary payload being EgyptSat.

Part of that mix are seven cubesats flying as secondary payloads, a majority of those built by university students. Also in that number is Bothell, Washington-based Tether Unlimited’s Multi-Application Survivable Tether (MAST) flight experiment, which includes three tethered picosats.

Everybody concerned has fingers crossed for this flight - and no wonder. A set of 14 cubesats from 10 different universities and one private company all lost their payloads when a Dnepr launcher failed, plowing a hole in the Kazakh tundra back in late July 2006.

Check out that smashing story at:

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/060830_cubesats.html

Another group keeping an eye on this Dnepr mission is Bigelow Aerospace of Las Vegas, Nevada. A straight and true flight of the rocket would surely sound an all-clear for takeoff of that firm’s Genesis-2 expandable module - to be lofted in the near future by another Dnepr rocket.