Roscosmos, S7 Group Mull Developing Reusable Commercial Space Vehicle

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russia's State Space Corporation Roscosmos and S7 Group are planning to develop the Soyuz-5 Light reusable launch vehicle based on the Soyuz-5 carrier rocket, Roscosmos General Director Dmitry Rogozin told Sputnik.

“They [S7 Group] will be very useful to us from the point of view of developing Soyuz-5 Light, a lightweight commercial version of the [Soyuz-5] rocket […] We want to advance to the reusability stage. It cannot be done now, but at the next stage we can do it with them", Rogozin said.

Rogozin earlier told Sputnik that he invited co-owner of the S7Ggroup, Vladislav Filev, to participate in talks in late April on the future of the Baiterek project, which involves launching Soyuz-5 [Irtysh] carrier rockets from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan.

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The S7 Group (later renamed to S7 AirSpace Corporation) was founded in 2005. S7 Airlines, which is a part of the corporation, is one of the largest domestic airlines.

Natalia Fileva, the co-owner of Russia's S7 Airlines, died in a plane crash in central Germany in late March. Russia's State Space Corporation Director Dmitry Rogozin has said he had taken the death of Natalia Fileva, whom he called Natasha, as a personal loss.

Fileva told Sputnik earlier that the company was going to cancel a contract with a Ukrainian rocket maker on the production of Zenit launch vehicles and use the soon-to-be-built Soyuz-5 rockets for launches from its recently purchased Sea Launch floating platform off Long Beach in California.

A source in the Russian space industry has said that S7 was still working on a strategy for commercial space launches at Natalia Fileva's request.

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