Nearly a disaster. Energia rocket first launch with Polyus. (2011-06-15)

First energiya rocket launch. This rocket was also used to launch the soviet space shuttle.You can see that it bents slightly just after lift-off (I bet some engineers suddenly remembered the N1). This was likely a bug in the guidance system, since this was the first launch and the second one (the one carrying the buran) went perfectly. Although that was a little scary, the system recovered very well and did a successful launch. The polyus payload guidance system failed after it was separated from energia core causing it to not reach orbit.