Work at Russia’s new $3bn Far Eastern Vostochny Cosmodrome has ground to a halt after a critical piece of infrastructure was discovered to have been built to the wrong dimensions and is too small to accommodate the latest version of the country’s Soyuz rocket, it was being reported last week.
The new spaceport in Amur is due to replace the Soviet-era Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as Russia’s primary spaceport, and was scheduled to be ready to launch the Soyuz-2 rocket by December, but the Meduza website is reporting that an unidentified source within space agency told the TASS news agency that the rocket would not fit inside the assembly building where its parts are to be stacked and tested before launch.The building “has been designed for a different modification of the Soyuz rocket,” the source said,
The problems with the testing and assembly building are the latest in a long line of corruption scandals, embezzlement cases, high-profile arrests, worker strikes, and construction delays that have plagued the project and prompted Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin threatening to ‘rip the heads off’ any contractors that slowed up its construction.
Vostochny Cosmodrome too small for Soyuz-2 rocket
Source: The Moscow Times