VOSTOCHNY COSMODROME /Amur Region/, April 11. TASS/. Russia’s Angara-A5 heavy-lift spacecraft will be a major carrier rocket to orbit satellites and spaceships from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Russian Far East, Khrunichev Space Center CEO Alexey Varochko said on Thursday.

The Khrunichev chief executive made this statement following the first successful test-launch of the Angara-A5 heavy carrier rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur Region on April 11.

"The manufacture of the carrier rocket began at the Omsk production site. The rocket was manufactured, delivered to the spaceport and it underwent all preparation stages. Today is the day that has drawn the line with this launch. The Angara-A5 will be a major vehicle to deliver into orbit heavy satellites and spaceships from this Amur land," the chief executive told reporters.

By now, Russian specialists have finished work on the conceptual design of the Angara-A5V rocket with a hydrogen-powered stage, Varochko said.

"Work will continue under the next 2025 program to create the Angara-A5V carrier rocket and its launch will surely take place from the Vostochny Cosmodrome," he 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.

The first Angara-A5 flight version for the Vostochny spaceport was manufactured by the Omsk-based Polyot Production Association (a branch of the Khrunichev Center within Roscosmos). In December last year, the manufacturer sent the Angara-A5 carrier rocket by railway to the Vostochny spaceport where it arrived in early January. The rocket was put on the launch pad on March 26.

Angara family of carrier rockets

The Angara is a family of next-generation Russian space rockets. It consists of light, medium and heavy carrier rockets with a lifting capacity of up to 37.5 tons. The new family of rockets uses kerosene and liquid oxygen as environmentally friendly propellant components compared to the fuel of the Proton-M rocket, which Angara will replace in the future.

Aside from the baseline Angara-A5 rocket (a liftoff mass of about 773 tons and a carrying capacity of up to 24.5 tons into low near-Earth orbit), Russia is set to produce the Angara-A5M modification with the increased lifting capacity and the Angara-A5V launch vehicle with the first and second reusable stages and the third hydrogen-powered stage.

Russia intends to use the Angara family of carrier rockets to put automatic probes (for instance, the Spektr-UF orbital observatory) into near-Earth orbit, deliver some modules of its future Russian Orbital Station and crews to the orbital outpost aboard the next-generation spacecraft.