New Russian Cosmodrome - Vostochniy

Which part of Russia is going to be ideal for landing cosmonauts? I heard Kazakhstan is used as landing site during Soviet times and until now because of its vast steppes. But how about in Russia?

The landing area for the new space station on a different orbit will be different... it is probably rather useful that they are expanding rail networks to the north and far east of Russia as well as building airfields around the place too...

The direction of return might change radically and make Russian landing areas more desirable.

BTW, regarding what they want when they come back down I would think some peace and quiet and not having to do things all the time would be at the top of their list... while on the space station they would each have fairly full rosters of jobs that need to be done and the constant sound of fans blowing air around the place would probably become annoying very quickly...

I would probably be playing with my TB-82... launching flares and shooting the local wildlife...

... if they are still using it of course...

Huge collection of chronological year wise photos of Angara launch pad construction at Vostochny Cosmodrome:

https://www.roscosmos.ru/26799/

Model of the Angara launch complex, Army 2021 forum

Putin to visit Vostochny spaceport in Russian Far East next week - Kremlin, 29/08/2021.

Dmitry Peskov earlier said that Russian President would take part in the Eastern Economic Forum.

MOSCOW, August 29. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur Region in the Russian Far East next week, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed to TASS on Sunday.

"Yes, President Putin is planning to make a stop at the Vostochny spaceport on his way from Vladivostok," the Russian presidential spokesman said.

The Kremlin spokesman earlier said that Putin would take part in the Eastern Economic Forum next week, which would run on Russky Island near Vladivostok on September 2-4. The program of the Russian leader’s working trip would also include other events in Vladivostok, he said.

Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos Chief Dmitry Rogozin said on August 26 that he was planning to meet with the head of state in the coming days to discuss the prospects of developing manned cosmonautics.

The Vostochny spaceport in the Amur Region in the Russian Far East is the first national civilian space center. A decree on the spaceport’s construction was signed by the Russian president in 2007. A multi-purpose launch compound for Soyuz-2 carrier rockets was built in 2012-2016 during the first stage of the Cosmodrome’s construction.

The second stage envisages building a launch pad for Angara-A5 carrier rockets and the associated infrastructure. The construction of the spaceport’s second stage is expected to be completed in late 2022.

The Russian leader has repeatedly visited the Vostochny Cosmodrome. The last time when Putin visited the Vostochny spaceport was in September 2019. At that time, the president held a meeting at the Cosmodrome to discuss the issues of developing its infrastructure and new rocket systems.

https://tass.com/science/1331431

Russian President Vladimir Putin got acquainted with the construction of the second stage of the Vostochny cosmodrome.

He arrived in the Amur Region on Friday evening after participating in the Eastern Economic Forum in Primorye.

The Head of State inspected the command post and the construction site of the launch complex for the Angara launch vehicles.




View from space:

Don´t know if this was posted before. Yandexed.

kvs wrote:They should build a Soyuz-5 launch pad there instead of at Baikonur.

Sounds like Amur is next after Angara is completed.

I would rather they built two Angara pads as originally envisioned. Drop Soyuz 5 for Angara A3. Use the two pads for multiple launch profile missions to the Moon and drop Yenisei as well. Get KVTK operational to increase Angara payload.

kvs wrote:They should build a Soyuz-5 launch pad there instead of at Baikonur.

They need to be present in Baikonur. Politics prevails over common sense here.

AZ-5 wrote:

kvs wrote:They should build a Soyuz-5 launch pad there instead of at Baikonur.

They need to be present in Baikonur. Politics prevails over common sense here.

Baikonour is still Russia's only portal for manned orbital missions. It is still important to cultivate a good working relationship, even if the Nazabayev regime has been a feckless unreliable "partner".  It will be interesting to see how things now develop given that it seems the last vestiges of Nazabayevs power base have finally be swept away and a new government is in firmly in charge, one that owes much of its security to Russia and her continued support and goodwill.

Imagine if foreign powers (whoever they were) had been successful in getting Tokayev overthrown and installing an anti-Russian regime?  A Kazakh version of Banderite Ukropistan would have to be one of Moscows (and Beijings) worst nightmares...

Sidenote: I guess we can look forward to the Soyuz-5 pad, the so-called "Nazabayev Launch Center", getting a re-brand in the immediate future?

lancelot wrote: Drop Soyuz 5 for Angara A3.

This would mean abandoning the creation of a superheavy rocket. Universal rocket modules "Angara" are not physically suitable for these purposes.

Scorpius wrote:This would mean abandoning the creation of a superheavy rocket. Universal rocket modules "Angara" are not physically suitable for these purposes.

They haven't yet committed to a SHLV concept. The "Yenisei" would have been based on Soyuz-5 modules, but they might decide to go with Amur-based methalox instead. I rather suspect they will plan to jointly perform lunar expeditions with China, in which case they would likely put their own SHLV on the back burner and let the Chinese lead with their CZ-9 which they will support with A-5 variants including A5V (which will have ~37T to LEO capability, just under 2x what Proton can manage).

A SHLV plus associated pad infrastructure is expensive and will have a very low launch cadence. It makes sense to go with the Chinese and leverage off their efforts. Plus it jams a broken bottle up the arse of the Murkanz... Anything that discomforts those b'stardz is a good thing in the current political climate.

The whole idea with using methalox is that it is supposed to increase reusability because it causes less coking than kerolox that will foul up the engine.
This is supposed to reduce the need to reinspect the engine between flights.

Methalox kind of sits in between hydrolox and kerolox in terms of density and performance. I think this makes it worst of both worlds but some think there is an advantage in this kind of architecture. Notably SpaceX. Russia also experimented with these fuels in the late Soviet and early Russian Federation periods. It was a competitor to more complex tripropellant engines which could switch between kerosene and hydrogen in different stages of flight. This was in an attempt to build a reusable SSTO, or close to it, vehicle as a successor to Buran.

For all the supposed achievements in reusability SpaceX has shown, they still have not demonstrated that the whole ordeal is cost competitive. In particular given current launch rates the extra expense of extra pads, drone ships, and the actual work in reuse, makes one wonder if you couldn't just churn out more vehicles out of the line and get to a similar or better cost reduction. They are trying to justify this by vastly increasing the amount of launches they do with putting huge satellite constellations like Starlink in space but it is highly questionable if this endeavor will ever be profitable. I mean Iridium was a bust and it had way, way, less satellites.

Starlink will be useless for the vast majority of the population. The majority of the population live in dense urban centers and each satellite does not have enough performance to serve that many people. Think of the density you require with cell phone towers and imagine translating that into space satellites. Because of the way satellite orbits work if you want low latency you need to be close to the ground, but the closer you are to the ground the higher will be your speed relative to the ground. So the more satellites you need to cover the same area 24h/7d. The satellites will also require periodic replacement and they can't be accessed for maintenance like a ground based tower. You already have the terrestrial cell phone network as a competitor which can also be used for data. So the use case for Starlink once proper 5G cell coverage increases will be very, very limited. Starlink top speed is 150Mbps, 4G is 100Mbps, 5G is like 1000Mbps. And 5G can scale that to dense urban centers.

The larger rockets only make sense if you send that much payload into space in the first place. If space launch remains expensive the best way to cut costs is not to reduce launch costs, which has a limited return, but to build things in space proper with space materials foregoing the need to lift that much mass in the first place. Or to use nuclear or solar based propulsion to reduce launch mass in deeper space exploration missions.

The Angara URM already has the necessary modular architecture to cover all current and near future Russian space launch needs. Plus a huge amount of capital has already been expended developing it. If, for whatever reason, the methalox reusables prove successful it would not be that hard to turn around the RD-191 engine technology to run on methane instead of kerosene. But for this Russia would need to justify the investment by vastly increasing their space launch requirement.

A dual Angara launch pad structure would enable a lot of lunar missions with in orbit assembly. If they modified one of the pads with an elevator so they can use it for manned space flight then they could use an Angara A3 based rocket as a manned vehicle launcher. This would be able to carry a larger capsule than the Soyuz and maximally use already existing infrastructure and investments. Angara A5 already has basically the same launch capacity as Proton which is capable of a manned lunar flyby in one launch. With the hydrolox upper stage in development the launch mass of Angara A5 to GTO will increase by like 50%. The further away the mission is the higher the mass improvement will be.

Like Big_Gazza said the launch requirements for the SHLVs are tiny. The US NASA SLS envisioned a launch rate of like a flight every two years with an increase to like two flights a year at peak rate for their manned lunar program. China already has dumped a huge amount of resources on developing the engines for their own SHLV and they already built production facilities. Their space launch site at Hainan island is close to the Equator and is accessible from ocean barge to carry extra large stages from the factory. It makes no sense to build yet another of these things. I don't need to tell you the limited economic benefit manned lunar exploration will have. This is a really long term thing. Just imagine the time it took for humanity to go from the discovery of fire to farming and from there to the industrial age. Who knows how long it will take to learn how to live in space properly?

Another thing. The mass of commercial satellites had increased for several years. But with the recent switch to more use of ion propulsion for reboosting instead of chemical rockets their mass has basically been cut in half. You can imagine what is the result of that in regards to space launch mass requirement. Electronics also keep getting more powerful. The only thing which has been kind of stagnant is the solar panels which have reached a maximum peak around the late 1980s I think. Any further improvements in solar power will be cost or mass reductions since their maximum theoretical area performance has been basically exhausted. So their only limitation to further growth is power.

I will try to explain as briefly as possible: Soyuz-LNG cannot be the basis for SHLV because of its low load capacity. Soyuz-5 involves the development of a whole line of missiles with a unified launch pad, like the Angara. If you want to create a modular SHLV for 100+ tons on LEO, then the minimum module should have a load capacity of 17-20 tons.
This is due to physics. Because of this, you cannot create a universal monoblock layout of a launch vehicle with an output weight, for example, 30 or 40 tons per LEO.

Scorpius wrote:I will try to explain as briefly as possible: Soyuz-LNG cannot be the basis for SHLV because of its low load capacity. Soyuz-5 involves the development of a whole line of missiles with a unified launch pad, like the Angara. If you want to create a modular SHLV for 100+ tons on LEO, then the minimum module should have a load capacity of 17-20 tons.

Agreed, and I don't think anyone expects a methalox SHLV to be comprised of Amur blocks as its a 13.6T class launcher (in expendable mode) and just not sufficient. Any methalox SHLV based on Amur technical solutions would need bloks to be upscaled to Soyuz-5 class, eg larger longer cores, extra engines. This would shift the development of a methalox SHLV many years to the right, but Roskosmos might accept this if A5V is sufficient to meet their heavy lift requirements for the next 10-15 years (entirely plausible if they do go in with a joint program with China). Being able to defer the cost of their own SHLV (by using the CX-9) would be a great win.

The core issue is what would you use a Saturn V like heavy rocket for these days.

Back then obviously it was for a landing on the moon, but technology has moved on and new options are emerging... but more importantly our options are expanding... a Saturn V rocket is simply not big enough for anything other than a landing on the moon or orbit around the moon.

To go to Mars or Venus you couldn't make a rocket big enough to launch from the surface of the Earth to get to these places in one hop... which means you are going to have to work on building very long range space ships in earth orbit.

You could do it in Moon orbit but that is a lot further to take material to assemble.

The advantage would be the rotational extra speed and reduced gravity well to escape from the Moon Earth cluster to go to the outer solar system, but either way building larger spaceships in space is the future of space exploration.... whether it is trips to other planets and moons or mining missions to asteroids and comets and other bodies.

If you are building spaceships in orbit then medium sized relatively cheaper rockets make more sense than enormous expensive ones.

When it comes to risk management you can spread the contents of smaller loads so the loss of a load is not so critical... if you are launching 2 x 50 ton payloads to orbit to build a 100 ton mission to Venus and you lose one payload the whole mission might need to be scrubbed...

Of course looking forward we can do things differently than was done in the past... for instance landing on the moon... no atmosphere so parachutes and wings don't work... but vacuum all the way down to the surface means ion engines might become a much cheaper and more efficient way of getting up and away... or even moving around the moon with an ion engine to make your land speeder hover like Luke Skywalker and a couple of other ion engines providing forward thrust...

Construction of the vostochny Cosmodrome Airport runway is expected to be completed in October 2022.

This was announced on Saturday by Roscosmos CEO Dmitry Rogozin.

"We expect that in October of this year, 2022, we will complete the work on the track," he said on rossiya-24 TV channel .

Rogozin added that the cosmodrome airport is necessary for the transport of heavy and fragile spacecraft.

"The heavy version of the Angara launcher will carry heavy, highly complex spacecraft, including in high orbits. Therefore, these heavy and very fragile spacecraft cannot be transported across the country by rail or plane to Blagoveshchensk, because from the capital of the Amur region is located 240 km from Vostochny," he said.

https://kosmosnews.fr/2022/04/09/la-piste-de-laeroport-du-cosmodrome-vostochny-achevee-en-octobre-de-cette-annee/

and ... another source

"An airport complex is being created, which is also extremely important
for us, because we need to deliver heavy and very vulnerable in their
microelectronics satellites directly to the cosmodrome. We plan to launch
a runway more than three kilometers long this year," he said.

more than 3km long ...

An-124 ..... airstrip requirements

Take-off run (maximum take-off weight): 3,000 m (9,800 ft)
Landing roll (maximum landing weight): 900 m (3,000 ft)

bingo ....

2nd last photo ... gives you a good perspective with all the little humans on the site

https://kosmosnews.fr/2022/05/20/vostochny-le-gaz-a-tous-les-etages/

and the airport
3.25km long ..... as opposed to my previous post from space that said 4kms

I must admit I thought that was pretty long
so I drove to the local Navy air base and its runway is about 2kms long .... looked down its length
and I thought "twice as long as that ?" .... that's bonkers

and it was

seems to be control tower being built ? in these shots

https://kosmosnews.fr/2022/05/17/piste-de-laeroport-de-vostochny-35-km-de-long-sur-60-m-de-large/

At the cosmodrome #Восточный, the 14th level of the future Cable-filling tower is installed in the design position

Let's start the countdown, there are 3 left...

The heart rejoices when you see how the new cosmodrome of Russia is growing!

Now 3200 workers are involved in the construction of the second stage of Vostochny, not counting hundreds of technical specialists of the Center for the Operation of Ground Space Infrastructure (TsENKI) of Roscosmos, who install their technological equipment for refueling and missile control systems in the constructed ground and underground structures of the Angara launch complex.

photos on Rogozin's Telegram channel

https://t.me/s/rogozin_do

"We began to build the vostochny Cosmodrome airport complex quite recently. A little more than a year ago, a frail forest stood on this site, geodetic work was carried out. And at the end of this year, we plan to test the runway for the first time.

It is more than 3 km and will allow receiving heavy cargo aircraft.
At the second stage, the runway will be extended to 4.4 km.

In 2023, a modern cargo-passenger terminal will be built. Thus, heavy and vulnerable spacecraft with expensive and unloving vibration and shaking electronics will be carefully delivered directly to the cosmodrome.

I am not talking about the convenience for the residents of Tsiolkovsky and the workers of the cosmodrome - in order to fly to another city in Russia, now they have to get to Blagoveshchensk, and this is more than 240 km.
The presence of a multifunctional modern cosmodrome is a guarantee of our full independence in the field of space activities, we understand this perfectly well, so we are building it at an accelerated pace."


why so long ? 4,400 m
hmmmmm ..... I wonder ....
how long is the runway at Cape Kennedy for the Space Shuttle ?

"The Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida has a single 15,000-foot (4,600 m) concrete runway, 15/33. "

now isn't that interesting ..... a remarkable coincidence .....

the X-37B uses the same runways as the Shuttle used to

Cape Kennedy 4572m
Vandenberg AF Base 4572m
Edwards AF Base 4579m

spaceplane dimensions
the X-37B dimensions are largely dictated by the launch rocket used
normally the Atlas which uses the RD-180 engine .....

Article on new Russian spaceplane
seems dimensions are largely dictated by the Soyuz rocket - which is similar to the Atlas
so you end up with much the same craft .... needing much the same runway length for landings

it's real - it seems .... this Vostochny Cosmodrome is starting to look like a cool place

info source :
A reason for optimism: a promising spaceplane from NPO Molniya
https://en.topwar.ru/181268-povod-dlja-optimizma-perspektivnyj-kosmoplan-ot-npo-molnija.html

"The first technical details were published by RIA News March, 25. According to their source, the project from "Lightning" is being developed on an initiative basis. AKC is created for commercial use in the interests of various customers. The orbital plane is planned to be unmanned; it will have to send into orbit and return to Earth only cargo.

The new Russian spaceplane will be similar in size to the American Boeing X-37B. The latter is less than 9 m long and has a wingspan of approx. 4,5 m and weighs no more than 5 tons. The limited dimensions and weight reduce the requirements for the launch vehicle. In this capacity, it is planned to use one of the Soyuz missiles in the promising AKS.

It should be noted that information about the small dimensions of the spaceplane is indirectly confirmed by official reports. The full-size mock-up of the orbital aircraft was demonstrated in the closed pavilion of Army-2020. "