Russia Cancels Launch of Newest Rocket Minute Before Lift Off

Bloomberg News, Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg) -- Russia canceled the launch of its newest rocket about one minute before liftoff due to equipment failure in a setback for its space program.

The Angara-A5 was set to launch at noon Moscow time from the Vostochny Cosmodrome near the border with northeastern China in Russia’s Far East. The start was called off by an automated abort command, Yury Borisov, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space corporation, said on Telegram. The event was preliminarily rescheduled for Wednesday, Borisov said.

It would have been only the fourth launch of the Angara-A5 since its debut in 2014 and the first since a mission in late 2021 that failed to reach its targeted orbit.

Those earlier flights took off from Plesetsk, a spaceport near the Arctic Circle often used for military missions. Vostochny, which opened in 2016 as Russia’s first commercial launch facility, has infrastructure for bigger payloads.

The ability to launch from Vostochny is a critical part of the Kremlin’s strategy to adopt the Angara-A5 and phase out the Proton, an older series of rockets that launch from Baikonur, the Soviet-era spaceport in Kazakhstan that Russia has continued using since the demise of the USSR.

Angara’s debut at Vostochny “is a very important event for the country, which is strengthening on-the-ground space infrastructure,” Borisov said last month during a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.

The first new Russian heavy rocket in more than 30 years, the Angara-A5 can carry as many as 24,500 kilograms of payload to low-Earth orbit, the region in space where Elon Musk has deployed more than 5,500 of SpaceX’s Starlink communications satellites. That’s about the same capacity as the Falcon 9 rocket but unlike the single-use Angara-A5, Musk’s vehicle can fly multiple missions.

The A5 also has military applications and is part of a bigger Russian program to develop a series of new rockets, all under the Angara name, that are already obsolete compared with more advanced foreign rockets, according to Pavel Luzin, visiting scholar at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

“This family of launch vehicles has been in development since 1995 and was old-fashioned even before its operational status,” he wrote in a February article published by the Jamestown Foundation. “Nevertheless, Angara-5 would be the only Russian heavy launch vehicle available for use in the foreseeable future, aimed mainly for use in the military space program.”

Russia was once the leader in space launches but is now far behind the US and China in the number of rocket launches and satellites, with Roscosmos losing many of its foreign customers since 2022. Borisov has warned that Russia may slide from fourth to seventh place by 2030 in the global market for space services.

Roscosmos aims to more than double its total number of rocket launches to more than 40 this year, Borisov said in an interview with Russian-language website ProKosmos in February.

(Updates with reason for cancellation and new schedule for launch starting in lead.)