Yuzhnoye Design Bureau’s long-awaited new rocket might have a new launch site – Nova Scotia, Canada.
A Canada-based company called Maritime Launch Services announced on March 14 that it had chosen a site on Canada’s eastern coast to launch Yuzhnoye’s Cyclone-4M rocket.
MLS is a joint venture of three different U.S. space companies that are cooperating to build the site, which comes with an estimated price tag of $110 million. Individual launches are projected to cost $45 million a pop, on average.
“We established this company in order to take this Ukrainian technology to a place where it can be commercially competitive,” MLS CEO John Isella told the Kyiv Post.
Yuznoye Design Bureau and Yuzhmash factory, both located in Dnipro, will design and supply the launch system. It is planned to have the capacity to loft 3,350 kilogram payloads into polar orbits.
“The fundamentals of Ukrainian industry are very strong in terms of being able to create a competitive rocket in the commercial market,” Isella said.
If it gets the required investment, the project has a tentative completion date of 2020.
Nova Scotia
The Cyclone-4M is planned to launch from the town of Canso, along the coast of the northern Atlantic.
Isella said that they chose the site after reviewing 13 locations globally. He added that Canada gave the company an edge, since the United States has limited restrictions on exporting advanced space technology for satellites to its northern neighbor.
“One of our competitors is the Indian rocket called PSLB – it’s very difficult for U.S. companies to send their stuff to India, they need to get a waiver from the U.S. government,” Isella said, adding “we decided on Canada and Nova Scotia because it a very favorable location geographically and favorable economically.”
Rockets also need long stretches of ocean to launch, Isella added, making the neighboring Atlantic a key asset for the launch site.
Growing pains
The Cyclone-4M rocket itself comes with a long history of starts, and false starts.
The rocket is derived from another model called the Cyclone 4. A decade of cooperation between Ukraine and Brazil would have had Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash supplying the South American country’s Alcantara spaceport with rockets. But Brazilian authorities backed out of the deal in April 2015, citing financial issues.
From there, Yuzhnoye decided to redesign the launcher. Now, it uses only two stages to reach orbit, meaning that there are two separate engine sets that have to fire before launch is complete.
Designers have also remade the rocket so it can be produced without sourcing parts from Russia.
The Cyclone-4M’s main engine is the RD-120, a Soviet design manufactured at Yuzhmash in Dnipro. The engine, as currently built, relies on parts from Russia, meaning that Ukraine will have to find a way to develop the necessary parts within Ukraine.
Need a seed
And the project will need further investment before it reaches liftoff. So far, United Paradyne, a rocket fuel supplier for NASA, has announced that it will invest an undisclosed amount into the project.
Isella, who declined to specify how much money United Paradyne had committed, said that the company’s investment could be considered “seed level.”
He added that he hoped to announce its first full round of investment at some point over the next three months, and that regulatory approval would likely come within the year.
Yuzhnoye has been developing rockets since 1951. Its partner factory, Yuzhmash, developed Zenit rocket boosters for Russia until that program ended due to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and support for armed separatists in the Donbas.
