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Russia to start modular assembly of Angara rockets in Siberia

The use of universal modules totally reorganizes the Angara assembly process, cting head of the Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center Andrey Kalinovsky said

MOSCOW, November 24. /TASS/. Russia’s advanced rockets of the Angara family will be manufactured at the assembly plant in the Siberian city of Omsk. The ‘Lego-principle’ assembly of one rocket will take several months, acting head of the Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center Andrey Kalinovsky said on the Rossiya 24 TV channel on Monday.

According to him, the use of universal modules totally reorganizes the Angara assembly process. “It will actually become a line assembly with the minimum production space, high labor productivity and high quality,” Kalinovsky said.

“Thanks to the modular rocket assembly principle, the Angara production plant has been organized in a totally new way. Today we have drafted the general concept of the plant that will be located in Omsk,” the Khrunichev Center head said.

The potential customers will be offered any configuration of the rocket from the light to heavy class. “The order fulfilment time is reduced to the minimum — 6 to 7 months owing to the use of the Lego type assembly principle. The production cost is considerably cut by the assembly line use,” Kalinovsky said.

The leadership of the United Rocket and Space Corporation previously said that the center’s new configuration envisages the creation of two “highly efficient compact” plants in Moscow and in Omsk. The Moscow plant’s area will decrease by 63% by 2018. The Omsk plant will start in 2015 the final assembly of the light-and heavy-class Angara rockets.

Angara is a new generation of Russia’s space rockets. All of the rockets currently in use were developed back in the USSR. The Angara family includes the light rocket Angara-1.2 (liftoff mass 171 tons, payload 3.8 tons), medium Angara-A3 (481 tons, 1-14.6 tons) and heavy Angara-A5 (773 tons 3-24.5 tons), Angara-A7 (1,113 tons, 7.6-35 tons). These rockets will be used to launch a wide variety of payloads — satellites, manned spacecraft and inter-planetary space probes.

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