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Angara-A5 rocket booster orbits Gagarinets CubeSat of Avant Space private company

The Orion booster keeps delivering test payload into the target orbit, Roscosmos added

MOSCOW, April 11. /TASS/. The Angara-A5 rocket booster has placed a Gagarinets CubeSat created by the Russian private company Avant Space into the target orbit, the State Space Corporation Roscosmos announced on Thursday.

"Today, the Orion booster launched by the first Angara-A5 carrier rocket has delivered a Gagarinets small satellite into low-Earth orbit," Roscosmos said in a statement.

The Gagarinets CubeSat 3U was engineered by the private company Avant Space and is designed to test the platform’s elements, it specified.

The Orion booster keeps delivering test payload into the target orbit, Roscosmos said.

The Angara-A5 heavy-lift rocket blasted off from the Vostochny spaceport in the Russian Far East at 12:00 p.m. Moscow time (9:00 a.m. GMT) on April 11 after two failed attempts in the previous two days.

This is the first test-flight of the Angara rocket from the Vostochny spaceport in eastern Russia. Previously, these launch vehicles blasted off only from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northwestern Russia.

The first three launches of Angara heavy rockets from the Plesetsk spaceport took place on December 23, 2014, December 14, 2020 and December 27, 2021. The launch of the light Angara rocket took place on July 9, 2014 (the suborbital test flight), on April 29, 2022 (the orbital flight) and October 15, 2022 (the orbital flight).

The Angara test-launch from the Vostochny spaceport has commenced flight development tests of the Amur rocket system that comprises the Angara carrier rocket and the spaceport’s infrastructure.

The construction of infrastructure for the Angara rocket at the Vostochny Cosmodrome began in 2019 and late last year the operational capacity of the technical compound and the launch pad was confirmed during the tests of the Angara-NZh, a full-size mockup of the Angara-A5 rocket. Technological solutions allow for launching all types of Angara rockets from one launch pad: from light to heavy carrier vehicles.

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