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Russian super-heavy booster vehicle to bring payloads of 70 tns to orbit

Roscosmos is ready to pay about $57,500 to a company that will do a technical assessment of the project, which it plans to implement at the Vostochny Space Center

MOSCOW, July 25. /TASS/. The new Russian super-heavy booster vehicle will have a capability to bring payloads of more than 70 tons to the low-earth orbit, the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos said in a bidding documentation uploaded at the web site of governmental procurements.

"The launching complex will have a launch pad that will make it possible to prepare booster vehicles for launches and to launch the booster vehicles of medium class and super-heavy class, the latter with a capacity to take payloads of more than 70 tonnes to the low-earth orbit," the documents said.

The super-heavy booster vehicle will have a universal launch pad suitable for liftoffs of the vehicles of various load-carrying capacity. Also, it will give an opportunity for ballistic testing of the central block and the third-stage block of the super-heavy booster vehicle with the diameter of 7.7 meters.

The super-heavy area will be transported in the vertical position after assembly in the technical area to the launch pad over a distance of 4.2 km. The launch equipment will be located in a pit having the depth of three to four underground floors.

Roscosmos is ready to pay 3.4 million rubles (about $57,500) to a company that will do a technical assessment of the project, which it plans to implement at the Vostochny Space Center in Russia’s Far East.

A well-informed source in the aerospace industry told TASS at the beginning of July the launch pad at Vostochny will have the same principles at launch pad No. 250 at the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan that was built for the Energiya booster vehicle. This will be a universal liftoff stand for the medium-class Soyuz-5 booster vehicles and for cluster of two, three or five boosters of the kind.

The project indicates that Roscosmos plans to hold the first flight tests of the booster vehicle in 2028.