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Russian Space Official Upbeat on Soyuz-2 Launch

Posted on: Monday, 8 November 2004, 18:00 CST

Excerpt from report by Russian news agency ITAR-TASS

Moscow, 8 November: The successful launch of the Soyuz-2 (Rus) booster will bring closer the start of the first Soyuz from the Kouru cosmodrome in French Guiana, the head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, Anatoliy Perminov, said today following the first test launch of the Soyuz-2 from the Plesetsk cosmodrome at 2130 Moscow time [1830 gmt] today.

The Space Troops press service told an ITAR-TASS correspondent that "radars of the command monitoring complex have been tracing the booster from the start. Computers have been processing information on the flight's coordinates and its trajectory and feeding the data to the Space Troops centralized command and control centre as well as to the main test space mission control centre".

[Passage omitted: A large-size dummy of a satellite was used as a useful load for the first launch of the Soyuz-2. The launch was initially planned for 29 October and had been postponed twice "for technical reasons".]

[RIA said at 1852 gmt that owing to a new engine modification the booster can carry a useful load which is by 1.2 t heavier than in the previous booster. The agency quoted deputy head of the Samara branch of the Progress design bureau Valeriy Abrashkin as saying that the increase is explained by the use of ecologically pure fuel components, namely, kerosene and oxygen. ]

Source: BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union

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