Developers will start making the Soyuz-5 rocket (Irtysh) that Russia is planning in order to replace Ukraine’s Zenit launch vehicles in mid-2021, General Director of Russian Space Rocket Center Progress Dmitry Baranov said, Sputnik News reported.
“At the start of next year we will get a new aluminum alloy [1580] that we will use to make a small number of testing samples, and I think that by the middle of the year [2021], possibly, we will already start making designs specifically for the launch vehicle,” Baranov said.
In 2016, Russia started working on the new Soyuz-5 (Irtysh) rocket to replace the Zenit launch vehicles produced in Ukraine.
In July 2018, Russian space agency Roscosmos signed an $8.1 million (61.2 billion rubles) contract with Rocket and Space Corporation Energia for the design and testing of Soyuz-5. Progress Space Center will develop and manufacture the new launch vehicle.
In July, Roscosmos announced that its subsidiary Energia had signed an agreement with Kazakh company Baiterek to create a Soyuz-5 launch complex at the Baikonur space center.
