Interfax: Start of Ankara from Plesetsk was postponed again

The launch of the Angara-A5 heavy launch vehicle from the Plesetsk cosmodrome, scheduled for December 25, has been postponed again.

According to Interfax, citing a source from the rocket and space industry, it is now expected that Ankara will still be able to launch by the end of the year. He did not specify the reasons for the next cancellation of the start.

Let us remind you that this is the third postponement of the start of Ankara. At first, the start was scheduled for December 23, it was postponed to December 24, yesterday it was postponed for another day. It was clarified that the launch was canceled literally one and a half minutes before the start: the automatic system was triggered to cancel the launch.

The first rocket launch took place on December 23, 2014. In May 2019, it became known that in 2019-2021 the Ministry of Defense will conduct three launches of the Angara-A5 carrier rocket and one – Angara 1.2. Later, the launch of 2019 was postponed to 2020. The second launch took place on December 14, 2020 from the Plesetsk cosmodrome.

“Angara” is a family of the latest Russian carrier rockets of a modular type of various carrying capacity, created on the basis of universal rocket modules (URM) with oxygen-kerosene engines. The family includes launch vehicles from light to heavy classes in the payload range from 3.5 tons (“Angara-1.2”) to 38 tons (“Angara-A5V”) in low earth orbit.