After two canceled launch attempts within a very short time, Russia has put its new “Angara-A5” launch vehicle into orbit for a test flight. “The machine is running, the flight is normal,” the Russian space agency Roscosmos said during its live broadcast on Thursday.
For the first time, a rocket from the ‘Angara’ series took off from the Vostochny space center, about 150 kilometers east of the Chinese border. After a few minutes of flying, it reached a speed of more than 25,000 kilometers per hour and entered orbit around the Earth.
Start canceled twice at the last minute
This was preceded by technical problems with the heavy “Angara-5”, a new post-Soviet launch vehicle. This led to the space agency having to cancel the launch at the last minute two days in a row. For example, on Wednesday the test start was canceled due to a malfunction in the engine ignition control system.
Russian space travel had already suffered a serious setback when Russia’s first flight to the moon in 47 years failed in August 2023 with the crash of the space probe “Luna-25”.
The “Angara” project started in 1991
The successful launch of the “Angara-5” is intended to demonstrate Moscow’s space ambitions and the growing role of the Vostochny facility. Russia started the ‘Angara’ project a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The first test flight of the ‘Angara-A5’ took place in 2014, followed by another in 2020, both from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the northwest. of the country.
Source: Krone
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