The Yasny launch base today is a city with hotels that meet international standards, ultra-modern greenhouses and installation buildings, where spacecraft from foreign space agencies receive and service. Quiet and clean town, which is famous for the presence of a mini-cosmodrome.
Order of Cosmotras
The technical customer of the launch base-spaceport Yasny was the Cosmotras International Space Corporation and the Roskosmos Design Institute Ipromashprom Open Joint-Stock Company. Foreign customers who tested the Yasny launch base, such as the French EADS Astrium, the British SSTL and the American space company Bigelow Aerospace, praised the working conditions created here, the level of secrecy and compliance with high-tech standards.
How it all began?
The Yasny launch base, located in the position area of the Special Rocket Forces, is the successor to the 13th Red Banner Orenburg Missile Division, one of the two most powerful divisions in the military units of the Russian Army. In the distant 1964, soldiers and officers who made up the nucleus of the regiment arrived in the village of Yasny. In incredibly harsh conditions, they coped with a huge scale of work: unloaded 9.5 thousand wagons with 48.5 tons of equipment. And in 1966, the first 8K67 rocket was loaded into the launcher shaft. For these heroic efforts, the division received the Order of the Red Banner, and commander Chaplygin Dmitry Kharitonovich the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.
By 1971, the division already consisted of ten regiments, and these are ten missile systems. The 8K67 combat missiles were replaced first with 15A15, and subsequently with the unique Voyevoda 15A18M ballistic missiles, which are called Satan by NATO classification. The only command post in Russia, which is called the "Egg" object, hanging underground, can even bear a nuclear strike. Today, as a mini-cosmodrome, two launch silos are used to launch R-36M2, taken out of service and converted into launch vehicles. This became possible thanks to the Dnepr program.
Conversion of Russia and Ukraine
The Dnepr program is a program that provides for the modernization and use of RS-20 rockets as carriers for launching space objects into orbits. It was born in the 90s of the last century on the initiative of two presidents - Russia and Ukraine. Cosmotras International Space Company was created by Roscosmos and the National Space Agency of Ukraine to manage the program. The company includes all the leading space enterprises in Ukraine and Russia: Yuzhmash Production Association and Yuzhnoye Design Bureau (Dnepropetrovsk), Strela Production Association (Orenburg) and many others. The program provides for the development of a rocket (installation of spacecraft fastening devices, additional flight control programs), which enables the potential of intellectual and material resources in the most reasonable form of military weapon conversion. And not only weapons, but also launchers. This is precisely what the Yasny training ground demonstrates, the launch base of launch vehicles.
Launch base "Clear": location
The coordinates of the base are 51 degrees north latitude, 59 degrees east longitude. This point is located in the South Trans-Urals of Russia, in the Orenburg region, in the Yasnensky district, in the city of Yasniy. Historically, this is the zone of the Dombarovsky positional area of special missile forces. In addition to the Yasny cosmodrome, the launch base of space objects, the city has a military airfield of the same name and a closed administrative and territorial formation Komarovsky village (population 7,254 people). The total population of the city is 15 675 people. But Yasny is not only paramilitary objects. Here is a unique Stone Lake with shores of granitoids (a very rare igneous rock) and 900 hectares of very special green massifs, in which exclusively birch and aspen trees grow (Kumak forests).
That same terrible Satan
The Dnepr launch vehicles, which are used at the Yasny launch base, are the third-generation RS-20B complex upgraded as part of the conversion program, manufactured by Yuzhmash Production Association (Ukraine, Dnepropetrovsk). According to NATO’s classification, SS-18Satan, which today is part of the Russian army’s armament as Vojvoda’s military missiles. These intercontinental missiles have been manufactured since 1979, and it would be an unforgivable mistake to dispose of them without use. The cost of launching this launch vehicle is about $ 30 million. And this is three times less than the launch of a Zenit middle-class rocket and a Proton heavy carrier. In addition, over the course of the entire career of the Dnepr launch vehicle, out of 20 launches, 19 were successful. Such an indicator did not dream of other middle class carriers. For reference, the carrier length is 39 meters, with a diameter of 3 meters and weight at the start - 211 tons.
Startup Timeline
The Yasny launch base, along with the Baikonur cosmodrome, is the Dnepr launch vehicle base of the Cosmotras International Space Company. For the period from the first launch, the Yasny base made ten launches of the carrier with spacecraft, and everything was absolutely successful. Customers of commercial launches were space companies from the United States of America, Italy, Germany, Japan, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, and Korea. The first launch of the carrier with the non-military Genesis I spacecraft of the American company Bigelow Aerospace (USA), which is engaged in space tourism, took place on July 12, 2006. A year later, the carrier launched the Genesis II satellite into orbit, the customer is the same company. In October 2008, the THEOS satellite, which is involved in mapping and monitoring of agriculture and forestry in Thailand, was successfully launched into orbit. Three satellites at once - BPA -1 (Ukraine), Prisma-Mango (Sweden) and Picard (France) - launched the Dnepr RS-20V carrier into geostationary orbits in June 2010. Further more. In 2011, 8 spacecraft were launched into orbit: 2 Ukrainian, 2 American, 2 British, 1 each from Turkey and Italy. In 2013, two launches were carried out: in August (1 satellite, the customer is the Republic of Korea) and in November (5 satellites, customers are the United States, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Japan, Poland).
The grand launch was made on June 20, 2014, when 33 spacecraft from 17 countries of the world were launched into orbits. Another launch of 2014 (November) launched 5 Japanese satellites into orbit. The last launch took place in March 2015 - the KompSat-3A satellite (South Korea) was launched into orbit.