Angara family

During the Soviet Union era, the nation conducted the majority of its launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakh SSR -- which was closer to the equator and more favorable for launches than the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia.

Launch from the Kazakh SSR was not an issue for Soviet Russia as the Kazakh region was part of the USSR. But after the collapse of the Union in December 1999, it meant Russia now relied on a foreign power granting them access to land to continue most space operations.

Russia immediately desired to move as many launches as possible into Russian territory, mostly to the Plesetsk Cosmodrome 800 km north of Moscow. This created an issue as Plesetsk was ideally suited for polar missions but not equatorial and Geostationary missions due to its location quite far north.

Therefore, a new, more powerful rocket was needed. Enter Angara.

Development of Angara began in 1992. The final design emerged 22 years later as a modular system that uses the Universal Rocket Module 1 (URM-1) for the first stage and a choice of either a slightly modified Soyuz 2.1b second stage or a URM-2 for the second stage.

Tech Specs

Height: 55.4 m (182 ft)

Width: 8.86 m (29.1 ft)

Mass: 171,500 kg (378,100 lb) - 790,000 kg (1,740,000 lb)

Stages: 2-3

The Angara can use a combination of one, three, or five URM-1s for first stage flight, and a Briz-M or under-development KVTK stage can be added for heavy payload missions and flights to Geostationary Transfer Orbit.

The first Angara flew an on-purpose suborbital test of both the URM-1 and URM-2 stages, successfully demonstrating their performance. The first orbital flight followed five months later in December 2014 when an Angara A5 launched a dummy payload into Geostationary Orbit.

The Angara A5 was the second variant of the family developed. It uses five URM-1s as its first stage, a URM-2 for the second, and a Briz-M for its upper stage.

The Angara A5 can bring 5,400 kilograms to Geostationary Transfer Orbit using the Briz-M upper stage. The under-development KVTK upper stage will increase that capability to 7,500 kilograms.

Development of Angara also serves another Russia space desire -- to consolidate their large fleet of rockets down to just two families: The Angara and the Soyuz. This will help reduce launch costs, meet all of Russia’s space needs, and keep Soyuz and Angara competitive on the commercial market.

Image courtesy of Roscosmos.

Site No. 35 at Plesetsk is a single pad that has only been used to launch Angara rockets since 2014.

It was originally built in the mid-1980s for the Zenit rocket, but construction was stopped after the collapse of the Soviet Union when Zenit launches from Plesetsk were canceled.

The pad was modified over ten years starting in 2004 to support Angara launches.

Image: Strategic Forces of the Russian Federation