The Angara rocket is a planned space-launch vehicle, designed to place heavy payloads into orbit. It is currently under development at the Moscow-based Khrunichev State Space Scientific Production Center. The rocket will be primarily launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia, thereby reducing Russia's dependency on Kazakhstan for the use of their Baikonur Cosmodrome where the current generation of Russian rockets is launched from (but the heavy Angara A5 will be launched from both Plesetsk and Baikonur). The Angara will also end the need to purchase Zenit rockets from Ukraine. The Angara will provide a similar lifting capability to the Proton rocket, the heavy lift workhorse of the Soviet Union and now Russia. The rockets are designed to be modular, similar to the US EELV, and the family will offer a range of configurations capable of lifting between 2,000 and 24,500 kilograms to LEO. In addition, the rocket core and booster stages will use liquid oxygen and RP-1 instead of hypergolic fuels, eliminating the need for Russia to clean up crash sites and at the same time apply current technologies that have been used on all Soviet/Russian launchers since the 1950s. Angara, like the current Soyuz rocket, can carry either a LOX/RP-1 upper stage or, like that of the U.S. Atlas V EELV, a cryogenic upper stage fueled by LOX and liquid hydrogen (LH2), similar to the U.S. Centaur upper stage. The first launch of an Angara (probably the Angara 1.1 or 1.2 version) is expected to take place in 2010 or 2011 at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.[1][2]
On August 26, 1995 the government of Russia adopted a resolution to develop the Angara launcher system.[3] On 2007-12-12 Krunichev announced that at NPO Energomash, engineers had successfully tested flight hydraulics and steering actuators for the first stage under near-flight conditions.[3]
