UGLEFORSK (Amur Region), August 21. /TASS/. There are no changes in schedule for commissioning the Vostochny spaceport and making first launch, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday at a session on cosmodrome construction.

"There are no changes in schedule. We need to speed up all major works on the minimum facilities required for a launch, eliminate lagging behind the schedule," Medvedev said.

He stressed that he understands very well that this task is difficult. "The construction is grandiose, very difficult, multi-faceted. People are really working in three shifts. However, we still need to move at the pace that we have set for ourselves," Medvedev noted.

Addressing heads of Roscosmos space agency and Russian Agency for Special Construction Project (Spetsstroy), the prime minister suggested that they concentrate on the problems and their possible solutions. "If we can know help somehow in the framework of existing procedures and organizational and financial capacities to support construction, tell me this, and I am ready to make such decisions immediately," he concluded.

"Construction work of the first stage at Vostochny heads into the homestretch. In December of this year, the first launch of the Soyuz-2 carrier rocket is to take place. To make sure that it is carried out according to the schedule, the list of launch facilities has been drawn up, a comprehensive plan has been endorsed, the deadlines for the facilities’ commissioning, preparation and delivery of the carrier rocket and the operational load to the cosmodrome have been determined," the Russian premier said.

"It’s necessary to focus on the completion of the construction of the launch facilities as much as possible," Medvedev told a meeting dedicated to the construction of the Vostochny cosmodrome.

He noted that "the facilities’ readiness was insufficient at the moment," adding that the current delay in the construction schedule was inadmissible. "It has to be reduced," Medvedev said.

The Vostochy cosmodrome is being built near the Uglegorsk town in the Amur region that will soon get the name of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. The complex will include two launch facilities, an aerodrome, cosmonauts’ flight training facilities, an oxygen-nitrogen plant and hydrogen plant, 115 kilometers of automobile roads and 125 kilometers of railways and other facilities. The first rocket to be launched from Vostochny is to be the Soyuz-2.1a, made by the Progress Rocket and Space Center. The carrier rocket will place into orbit the Samara satellite Aist-2, the SamSat-218 nanosatellite of the Samara State Aerospace University and the Lomonosov satellite of Moscow State University (MGU).