MOSCOW, December 24. /TASS/. The costs of launching one heavy rocket Angara-A5 is still close to $100 million for the time being, but they will certainly go down when serial production begins, the general designer of the design bureau Salyut at the Khrunichev Center, Sergey Kuznetsov, said on Thursday.

He explained that the costs of launching one heavy rocket lay between $50 million and $100 million.

"Angara was produced by an experimental unit. The costs are closer to the upper limit, but preparations for batch production are underway," Kuznetsov told the round-the-clock television news channel Rossiya-24 in an interview, adding that Proton and Falcon-9 were closer to the bottom of this price range.

Kuznetsov is certain that as production volumes grow, the costs will go down.

"This is easy to explain: there is an industrial plant that spent four years making one rocket. One rocket is to compensate for all that was spent on electricity and on keeping the production facility going. If four to six rockets are made a year, the price will certain go down," he said.

A memorandum containing explanations of the Khrunichev Center’s financial accounting for 2019 earlier said that Angara’s costs would go down from 7 billion rubles to 4 billion. The Russian space corporation Roscosmos earlier said that in the process of research and development the Khrunichev center would build several Angara rockets 5 billion rubles apiece.