In recent comments to the Russian state-run media service TASS, the chief of Roscosmos said the country's newest rocket, the Soyuz-5, should take flight for the first time before the end of this year.
"Yes, we are planning for December," said Dmitry Bakanov, the director of Roscosmos, Russia's main space corporation. "Everything is in place."
According to the report, translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell, the debut launch of Soyuz-5 will mark the first of several demonstration flights, with full operational service not expected to begin until 2028. It will launch from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.
From an innovation standpoint, the Soyuz-5 vehicle does not stand out. It has been a decade in the making and is fully expendable, unlike a lot of newer medium-lift rockets coming online in the next several years. However, for Russia, this is an important advancement because it seeks to break some of the country's dependency on Ukraine for launch technology.
What is the Soyuz-5
The new rocket is also named Irtysh, a river that flows through Russia and Kazakhstan. The rocket has been in development since 2016 and largely repurposes older technology. But for Russia, a key advantage is that it takes rocket elements formerly made in Ukraine and now manufactures them in Russia.
Essentially, the Soyuz-5 booster is a slightly larger copy of an older rocket manufactured in Yuzhmash, Ukraine, the Zenit-2. This medium-lift rocket made its debut in the 1980s and flew dozens of missions into the 2010s. It was the last major rocket developed in the Soviet Union and was designed by the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau in Dnipro, Ukraine. The Zenit's first and second stages were manufactured there. However, the first-stage engine, the extremely powerful RD-171 engine, was designed and built by NPO Energomash in Russia.