OMSK (Sputnik) – Russia’s newest heavy rocket carrier Angara-A5 will orbit a commercial satellite for the first time in 2016, the head of the Khrunichev Center said Wednesday.
“[The launch will be in] 2016, everything depends on the space apparatus. I think that this will be a commercial launch, but I don’t know if it will be a foreign or Russian apparatus,” Andrei Kalinovsky told journalists.
The heavy-class Angara-5 rocket, part of the Angara family of rockets designed to replace the Proton used previously to put space vehicles into a low Earth orbit, was first successfully launched in December 2014.
The family's super-heavy version that Roscosmos' Komarov announced would be launched within the next decade expects to have a much higher payload and would require a separate launch pad.
