Even as the project's US organisors said there was still some hope that the Cosmos 1 was functioning, personnel from the Russian navy's Northern Fleet and space forces were scouring the uninhabited Novaya Zemlya archipelago between the Barents and Kara seas, ITAR-TASS quoted the fleet's headquarters as saying.

The Northern Fleet has set up a commission to investigate what went wrong during the first stage of the Volna rocket's flight, 83 seconds after blast-off from a Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea.

Meanwhile, Russia's space forces told AFP that fragments had been found of what was probably a Molnaya-M rocket, which crashed Tuesday after lift off from Plessetsk in northern Russia while carrying a military satellite.

The pieces were found in the Tyumen region of Siberia.

The joint US-Russian Cosmos 1 project cost four million dollarsmillion euros) in private funds, with the bulk of the funding coming from America's Cosmos Studios.

The launch itself was funded by the Russian government.

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