The Russian private firm SR Space and the T1 IT Holding Company signed an agreement on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) on developing a sub-orbital carrier rocket and launching it beyond the Karman line, a TASS correspondent reported from the scene.
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As the SR Space press office specified for TASS, the new sub-orbital rocket is set for its launch at the end of the year.
"The launch is scheduled for the end of the current year to deliver a signal transmitter payload," the press office said.
The transmitter’s signal sent to Earth is expected to be received by drones engineered by the company. "This is necessary to test interaction with remotely piloted aircraft systems and the technology of their remote control and flight control of a swarm in automatic mode," it explained.
This will be the first launch of a private sub-orbital rocket in Russia to an altitude of over 100 km (the altitude where outer space begins). The carrier rocket will measure 5.17 meters in length and 0.45 meters in diameter and weigh 253 kg.
"Lately, we have had to accelerate work and transform our business and that is why we are switching to commercial flights a year ahead due to the rapidly growing demand for the launch of space vehicles," the press office quoted SR Space CEO Oleg Mansurov as saying.
The sub-orbital rocket launch will also test the technologies developed by the T1 Holding Company. In particular, the test flight will use the CAE (computer-aided engineering) system to gauge aerodynamic and thermal loads on the rocket and the T1 Cloud computing capacities to accelerate three-dimensional aerodynamic and thermal calculations, the press office specified.
"The data obtained during the flight will eventually pave the way for delivering small spacecraft and/or their clusters to the near-Earth orbit. This can create a new standard in the sector of commercial cargo delivery into space," T1 Holding Company CEO Igor Kalganov said. ■