The Russian Space Agency (Roskosmos) plans to announce the relevant tender in the next few days. After it becomes operational, the rocket will lift off from the Vostochny (Eastern) space center in the Amur Region in the Russian Far East.
However, Russia has failed to develop the Angara launch vehicle, the main element of the proposed rocket, or a new-generation manned spacecraft in the last 10 years. This and the creation of the Vostochny space center are seen as the major problems.
First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said the location of the new space center would be chosen next year. It will start launching automatic spacecraft in 2013 and the first manned missions would lift off from there in 2018.
Ivanov stressed that the proposed space center will feature entirely new facilities and will launch next-generation rockets.
But it is unclear whether the Vostochny space center will become operational in 2009. Moreover, the Angara rocket still remains on the drawing board.
After the Soviet Union disintegrated in December 1991, Russia came to realize that it could no longer implement independent space programs. Before 1992, the U.S.S.R. launched all heavy-duty Proton rockets, as well as geostationary early-warning and telecommunications satellites from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan.
But the situation changed after Kazakhstan became independent and Russia now has to pay $115 million a year to use Baikonur. To make things worse, Russian national security now depends on the whims of a foreign state.
On September 15, 1992, the Russian government signed a resolution on developing the heavy-duty Angara launch vehicle. After much debate, it was decided to launch the new rocket from the Plesetsk space center, a former inter-continental ballistic missile base in the Arkhangelsk Region in northern Russia.
Unfortunately, Plesetsk is notorious for its high launch costs and does not compare well with equatorial space centers that can launch 100% heavier payloads.
Soviet generals who had chosen Plesetsk as the best possible location for launching a possible counterstrike against the United States across the North Pole never thought that space satellites would eventually lift off from there.
In the 1990s, the Russian government opted for Plesetsk with a ramified infrastructure and because it believed that separate Angara launch pads would prove too expensive.
In 1994, the Moscow-based Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center won a contract for developing the Angara-26 launch vehicle that could orbit 26-ton payloads. In January and August 1995, President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian government issued a decree and resolution on developing the new rocket.
However, the Russian Aerospace Agency (Rosaviakosmos) lost interest in the Angara vehicle because Moscow and Kazakhstan had settled their differences on using the Baikonur space center by the mid-1990s.
Rosaviakosmos was quite happy about operational rockets, while only the military supported the Angara program and believed that Russia must have independent access to space.
The Defense Ministry provided moral support to the Khrunichev Center, which mostly had to pay its own way.
The initial Angara design featured one oxygen-kerosene engine and one oxygen-hydrogen engine. Both engines were originally developed for the first stage of the Zenit launch vehicle and the main section of the giant Energia rocket. In the long run, it was decided to develop a new oxygen-kerosene engine and its supercharged high-thrust version. But the project encountered serious difficulties from the very outset despite previous achievements.
In the mid-1990s, a revamped Angara version eventually featured the URM-1 multi-purpose rocket module for manufacturing light-weight, medium-weight and heavy-duty rockets to meet the projected launch market demand.
Light-weight launch vehicles were both expensive and unpopular, and the modular Angara concept proved extremely expensive and time-consuming.
In the final count, three-stage, rather than two-stage, heavy-duty and medium-eight rockets were required because standardization negatively affected product quality and reliability. To make things worse, the heavy-duty Angara has more boosters than the Proton does and its stages are scattered over larger areas.
Although the initial Angara version was to have lifted off from the Zenit-2 launch pad in Plesetsk, an entirely new general-purpose launch facility was required to launch space rockets in every category. Part of the Zenit-2 facility's infrastructure was used during launches until 2006 when the state engineering enterprise Zvyozdochka in Severodvinsk, in northern Russia, built a standard launch pad for launching all members of the Angara rocket family.
Initial flight tests are to commence in 2011 with the launch of the light-weight Angara-1.2 and the rocket's heavy-duty version is to lift off in 2012. This risk-reduction concept implies that the entire program, which has been regularly financed out of the federal budget since 2004, will be completed 20 years after its inception.
Russia and Kazakhstan recently argued over the losses incurred by a failed Proton launch from Baikonur. If not for this and other similar scandals, Moscow would have no motives for building a new space center in the Russian Far East.
Once the Vostochny center is complete, the Russian space program, which has been suffering from the dire consequences of the Soviet Union's disintegration since 1992, will become completely self-sufficient.
Although Sergei Ivanov claims that Russia now launches all military spacecraft from Plesetsk, it is impossible to launch geostationary satellites from there and the location is only suitable for low-orbit launches.
According to Ivanov, a space center resembles an entire city with schools, apartment buildings, hospitals, daycare centers, power plants and a ramified transport network, rather than just a residential area. Consequently, senior government officials should not make unrealistic statements with regard to its construction; on the contrary, any delays are quite explainable.
It appears that the government should first build the required infrastructure and create normal working conditions for the new space center's personnel. Such conditions would be a far cry from the late 1950s and the early 1960s when the first ICBMs were placed on combat duty in Plesetsk, and when the launch pad and maintenance workers had to live in railcars and the local vehicle assembly building's equipment rooms. Still this was nothing compared to Baikonur whose first builders had lived in dug-outs.
Yury Zaitsev is an academic adviser with the Russian Academy of Engineering Sciences.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
