"Preliminary conclusions might be made shortly," the source said.
The Volna carrier rocket and its cargo, the Cosmos-1 satellite, set off from a Russian submarine in the Barents Sea late Tuesday night.
"The rocket engine stopped working 83 seconds into the flight and the satellite failed to reach orbit," the source said.
However, the Cosmos-1 project's American managers announced that two monitoring stations had caught a weak signal from the satellite.
Monitoring stations in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and the mobile monitoring station in Majuro on the Marshall Islands received "what we assume are the signals from the spacecraft," the U.S. Planetary Society said in a statement. The society is participating in the project.
The Cosmos-1 experimental satellite marks the first attempt to implement the idea of using a "solar sail," which uses solar radiation as an energy source.
