Federatsiya, Angara, and Soyuz-5

There’s quite a bit of shuffling going on in Russia.

First, the May 27th announcement that Federatsiya is now planned to fly on Soyuz-5 (Feniks):

Roskosmos plans rescheduling the first launch of the Federatsiya crewed spacecraft from 2021 to 2022 and to make it from Baikonur on the Feniks new middle-class carrier, sources at the space sector told TASS on Saturday.

Formerly, the first launch was planned for 2021 from the Vostochny pad on the Angara class carrier.

Seems like a weird move to make from a chronically-delayed vehicle that has flown to a yet-to-be-developed launch vehicle.

Some thoughts on Russia’s long-term strategic issues from an unnamed expert:

In the expert’s opinion, the change of plans is related not only to the country’s difficult economic situation but also to certain strategic miscalculations in the long-term space program planning.

If Russia had had a long-term national strategy, such unexpected decisions could not have been made, the expert noted.

“We spoke some time ago for adopting a national cosmonautics development program. As there is no such a strategy, I completely don’t understand the expediency of a super-heavy rocket. In my view, the decision has been made in favor of sectoral rather than national interests,” the expert said.

Sounds familiar.

Finally, in other curious news, Soyuz-5 will fly from the Sea Launch platform:

Russia plans to hold launches of its new Soyuz-5 medium-class carrier rocket from the Sea Launch platform, Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos Head Igor Komarov said on Thursday.

“This project [Soyuz-5] will be used by our private partners and we are going to use it in the Sea Launch. The partnership with S7, which we signed last year, will develop,” the Roscosmos chief said.

According to Komarov, Roscosmos intends to use this project both for state and private needs.

Given the state of the Russian space industry, with a wealth of programmatic issues and a lack of funding and vision, it’s hard to see a lot of this happening. Circumstances like that—not unlike where NASA is with SLS and Orion—tend to lead to constant shuffling of plans.