Spaceflight

The maiden flight of Russia’s new Samara Soyuz 2-1b launcher is expected to take place this September, if integration tests of the new RD-0124 third-stage engine succeed this March.

The September flight from Baikonur’s pad 31 will launch French space agency CNES’s extra-solar observation spacecraft Convection Rotation and Planetary Transits. Integration and two hot firing tests of the Soyuz 2-1b’s third stage will take place near Moscow in March and April.

Manufactured by the Design Bureau of Chemical Automatics, in Voronezh in south-west Russia, the RD-0124 replaces the RD-0110 third-stage engine and provides an additional 34s specific impulse, increasing overall launcher performance.

RD-0124 firing tests on 27 December were “successful”, says François Barreau, launch-provider Starsem’s vice-president for the Soyuz programme in French Guiana.

The first -1b will use the existing S fairing, which is 3.71m (12.2ft) in diameter and 7.7m long, rather than the new, larger 4.11m-diameter, 11.4m-long ST payload fairing. The ST fairing will fly for the first time on a Soyuz 2-1a on 30 June, when it launches European meteorological satellite operator Eumetsat’s Metop spacecraft from Baikonur.

The -1a’s maiden flight, with an S fairing, took place on 8 November 2004. The Metop launch was planned for last year, but delayed by problems with the ground segment.

The existing Soyuz-2, in its -FG version, is used for International Space Station crew and cargo missions, and has modified injection systems on the first- and second-stage engines. The -1a has new digital flight controls, to which the -1b adds the RD-0124 engine. Both versions can use both fairings.