KYIV. Nov 18 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Dnipro-based Pivdenne Machine Building Plant named after Makarov (Pivdenmash) is preparing to ship to the U.S. Orbital ATK Inc. two main structures of the first stage of the Antares medium-class launch vehicle, whose cargo flights to the International Space Station (ISS) under a contract with NASA have resumed in October after its upgrading.
According to a report on the Pivdenmash website, in late October, representatives of the American company inspected the missiles. At present, one of the rockets has already been loaded on the railway platform, the installation of the systems on the second rocket is being completed. This work is expected to end in November.
“It is planned that two missiles will be delivered to Mykolaiv port soon from where they will be sent to the launch site,” the report says.
Ukraine and the United States have been cooperating under the Antares program since 2008. Orbital ATK designed the Antares launch vehicle under a contract with NASA worth $1.9 billion.
The basic structure of the first-stage launcher was designed by Pivdenne Design Bureau and produced at Pivdenmash. Ukraine’s Hartron-Arkos, Hartron-Ucom, Chezara (Chernihiv Plant of Radio Equipment), and Rapid are also involved in cooperation on the project.
In October 2014, the launch to the International Space Station of a private cargo spacecraft, Cygnus, atop an Antares rocket from NASA’s Wallops flight facility in the state of Virginia ended in failure: the rocket exploded just seconds after the liftoff. The failure was traced to a fault in the first stage engines.
After this, Orbital ATK decided to replace the first stage engine. Following a tender for the new version of the Antares, Russian RD-181 oxygen-kerosene engines were selected as the engines of the first stage. Ukrainian experts ensured replacement and compatibility of the new engines of the first stage with a minimum change in the basic configuration of the missile.
Five launches of Antares are scheduled to be conducted by the end of 2018, six more between 2019 and 2024.
According to earlier reports, the U.S. plans to fully stop using Russian RD-180 engines, which are now used by the rocket Atlas 5 of the U.S. United Launch Alliance (ULA)., by 2019 due to the restrictions imposed on military-technical cooperation with Russia by the Congress in 2014. The supply of RD 180 engines, which are installed on new rocket Antares for the ISS, is now limited to the civilian sphere. Among the participants in the tender fort the development of engines to replace the Russian RD 190, which the U.S. Air Force announced in June 2015, was Ukraine’s design and construction bureau Pivdenne (Dnipro) with its new liquid RD 815.
At the moment, Ukraine and the U.S. continue negotiations on cooperation in rocket engines production.
