To quote from The Planetary Society report page:

http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/update_20050720.html

"The Planetary Society was not invited to be part of the failure review. We did receive a warning from the U.S. State Department reminding us that, under International Arms Traffic Regulations (ITAR), we are not allowed to participate in a launch failure review without their approval.

"But even before the failure review, there was a serious lack of communication and coordination with the project and launch vehicle teams."

Funny but that is not the impression I got from all the previous news about the Cosmos 1 mission. I thought all kinds of technical and political issues had been solved for this project. Mutual cooperation and trust was supposed to be the order of the day.

We lost the chance to see a solar sail craft in action, one that might indeed change the course of space exploration. If TPS does decide to build and launch Cosmos 2, it better be with the cooperation of someone else and not just to make some rather outdated political gesture. The science and technology comes first.