Russia Should Speed Up Development Of Angara Rockets, Reduce Launch Costs - Official

The development of Russia's Angara family of carrier rockets should be accelerated, while the cost of launches should be cut down in order to maintain Angara's competitiveness, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov said on Wednesday

GORKI (Moscow Region) (UrduPoint news / Sputnik - 23rd January, 2019) The development of Russia's Angara family of carrier rockets should be accelerated, while the cost of launches should be cut down in order to maintain Angara's competitiveness, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov said on Wednesday.

"Undoubtedly, it is necessary to boost work on the Angara space-launch vehicle of all classes, because, unfortunately, Proton is gone, but Angara has not replaced it yet ... We need to work on the cost of launch services and be competitive," Borisov told reporters after the meeting on the financial and economic state of affairs in Russian space corporation of Roscosmos.

Last week, Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin said that the company had adopted a plan to improve the competitiveness of Russia's new Angara and Irtysh carrier rockets by reducing their prime cost.

The Angara family of launch vehicles is designed to carry anywhere between two and 40 tonnes into low Earth orbit. It has been in development since 1995 and was the first orbit-capable rocket developed by Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union to replace the older Proton-M rockets.