Angara launch site at Vostochny to be ready by year-end - Roscosmos head

MOSCOW. Jan 19 (Interfax) - The construction of the Angara-5 launch site is underway at the Russian Vostochny Cosmodrome; it will be finalized by 2024, Roscosmos head Yury Borisov said in a statement.

"We are hoping to finalize construction by the middle of the year, while the installations and preparations for the launch will be completed by the end of the year, as envisaged by your order," Borisov told Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Roscosmos said on November 12, 2022, that construction and installations will be finalized at the cosmodrome in August 2023.

There are three stages to the construction of the Vostochny Cosmodrome. A launch pad for Soyuz rockets is ready, while the site for Angara rockets is due to be finalized in 2023.

Angara is a family of Russia's newest modular-type launch vehicles with various lifting capacities based on universal rocket modules with oxygen-kerosene engines. The rockets range from light to super-heavy with a lifting capacity of 3.5 tonnes (Angara-1.2) to 38 tonnes (Angara-A5V) on a low near-Earth orbit.

Different modifications of Angara rockets are built by using various numbers of universal rocket modules - URM-1 (for the first and second stages) and URM-2 (for the upper stages). The number of universal modules in the first stage determines the lifting capacity of the launch vehicle. URM-1 is powered by the RD-191 liquid-fuel jet engine designed by NPO Energomash in the Moscow region, while URM-2 has the RD-0124A engine developed by Voronezh-based KBKhA.

Vostochny is the youngest cosmodrome in Russia. It had its inaugural launch in 2016.