You're reading: Yuzhmash builds new satellite launch rocket

DNIPROPETROVSK – In the hangars of a once secret Soviet missile factory, Ukrainian engineers on Friday delivered the first of 38 rockets for an international consortium’s seaborne satellite launch venture.

Sea Launch Director Allen Ashby accepted the 61-meter Zenit rocket from the director of Ukraine’s Yuzhmash missile plant, which is producing the two-stage boosters to carry commercial satellites into orbit from an ocean-going platform for a joint venture led by the U.S. aerospace giant Boeing.

An additional stage of the Zenit is being manufactured by the Russian plant Energia. When combined, the rockets will be carried by a command ship and assembled at sea for loading onto an oil platform converted into a mobile launch pad by Norway’s Kvaerner Maritime, another Sea Launch partner.

If all goes well, the first Zenit rocket will be used in a pre-launch test in early May. The program’s first commercial payload, a communications satellite owned by Hughes, another U.S. aerospace firm, is to be launched on Oct. 28, Ashby said. Yuzhmash Director Yury Alenseev said work on the second Zenit is nearly complete. Hughes has already committed $1 billion for the launch of 10 additional satellites, according to Stephen Klausner, a senior manager at the company.

‘I have watched the project for two years, and I have all the confidence in the Zenit rocket and success of the project,’ he said.

Zenit rockets are specially designed to be transported in segments, assembled at sea and function automatically after liftoff.

‘There is no other rocket for the Sea Launch platform,’ said Ashby. ‘This was a marriage of two very special things.’

Sea Launch directors said the venture has already received a total of 18 orders for launches. The company hopes to able to launch two satellites next year, then six annually beginning in 2000. However, Ashby was optimistic that Sea Launch could eventually handle even more.

‘Our business case is based upon six rockets per year, but we can do more than six. We think we can go to eight per year, 10 per year,’ Ashby said. He estimated that eight launches a year would give the venture 20 percent of a global market crowded with a growing number of competitors. Initial investment in Sea Launch, which was conceived in 1995, stands at about $500 million, Ashby said. The project has brought new life to the nearly-defunct Yuzhmash plant, the Soviet-era manufacturer of nuclear missiles headed by future President Leonid Kuchma from 1986 until 1992.

‘The plant used to make up to 100 missiles per year, but now we have halted military production completely,’ Alekseev said, adding that the only thing Yuzhmash still made for the government was a few trolleybuses. Seven thousand of the plant’s mostly idle 22,000 employees have been engaged for Sea Launch, the only project supporting research and development at Yuzhmash, he said. ‘Because of this contract, the whole plant is surviving. It does not give us bread with butter and caviar, but it gives us stable bread,’ Alkseev said.

A 58-year-old supervisor at Yuzhmash who declined to give his name said the contract has allowed her to reclaim her Hr 120 a month job. Like many of her co-workers, she had left the dying plant five years ago to look for work elsewhere.

‘I returned to the plant as soon as the program started, and I am happy I can apply my skills again and help my family with money,’ she said.

Yuzhmash and the design bureau Yuzhnoye own 15 percent of the Sea Launch venture. Boeing owns 40 percent, Kvaerner Maritime owns 20 percent and Russia’s Energia owns 25 percent.