Cosmic Penguin
Geek Penguin in GTO
In the latest of weird spacecraft launches from Russia, a little used rocket launched from a missile silo at Baikonur with a radar spysat for some nation that don't want to have anything to do with it!
A converted UR-100N (a.k.a. SS-19 Stiletto) ICBM, known as the Strela rocket (Russian for arrow), was launched from an underground silo at area 175 at the west side of the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 04:43 UTC on December 19. The 3rd such rocket to fly (itself a close relative of Khrunichev's Rockot. without the latter's Breeze upper stage, while retaining the old missile's terminal control stage), it deployed the 2nd Kondor series satellite named Kondor-E into a 500 km, 74.7 deg. orbit 25 minutes later.
Like its sibling Kondor 1 (a.k.a. Kosmos 2497) launched in June 2013, Kondor-E is a radar satellite developed by NPO Mashinostroyeniya, one of the descendants of the huge OKB-52 design bureau led by Vladimir Chelomei. The company mostly deal with making anti-ship missiles, but they were also the design authority of the Almaz military space station and radar spysat programs!
The Kondor satellite program was started in the early 1990s as a replacement of the big Almaz-R radar satellites, but like every other Russian spaceflight project economic programs means that it would move at snail's pace for the next decade, so in addition to versions for the Russian military NPO Mashinostroyeniya tries to sell them to other nations. The satellite launched this time is the first of the export "Kondor-E" version, placed in the same orbital plane as Kosmos 2497.
But who's the customer? Well it turns out that it's.......South Africa! According to their local media, the South-African Ministry of Defense awarded a contract for a radar satellite back in 2006 under a secret project named "Project Flute" that is capable of all-weather, day-and-night imaging of the Earth's surface. However SA and Russia quickly entered quarrels about how the data would be distributed, since originally the data would be received from only Russian ground stations (!), stalling the project for many years. Apparently the situation was solved by building a ground station at SA. Nevertheless, the project is still under close scrutiny from the opposition parties of the South-African parliament as a huge waste of money (after all, the only military action SA is currently in are UN peacekeeping in Somalia and South Sudan).
Interesting, eh? :hmm:
RussianSpaceWeb.com: Kondor-E
A converted UR-100N (a.k.a. SS-19 Stiletto) ICBM, known as the Strela rocket (Russian for arrow), was launched from an underground silo at area 175 at the west side of the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 04:43 UTC on December 19. The 3rd such rocket to fly (itself a close relative of Khrunichev's Rockot. without the latter's Breeze upper stage, while retaining the old missile's terminal control stage), it deployed the 2nd Kondor series satellite named Kondor-E into a 500 km, 74.7 deg. orbit 25 minutes later.
Like its sibling Kondor 1 (a.k.a. Kosmos 2497) launched in June 2013, Kondor-E is a radar satellite developed by NPO Mashinostroyeniya, one of the descendants of the huge OKB-52 design bureau led by Vladimir Chelomei. The company mostly deal with making anti-ship missiles, but they were also the design authority of the Almaz military space station and radar spysat programs!
The Kondor satellite program was started in the early 1990s as a replacement of the big Almaz-R radar satellites, but like every other Russian spaceflight project economic programs means that it would move at snail's pace for the next decade, so in addition to versions for the Russian military NPO Mashinostroyeniya tries to sell them to other nations. The satellite launched this time is the first of the export "Kondor-E" version, placed in the same orbital plane as Kosmos 2497.
But who's the customer? Well it turns out that it's.......South Africa! According to their local media, the South-African Ministry of Defense awarded a contract for a radar satellite back in 2006 under a secret project named "Project Flute" that is capable of all-weather, day-and-night imaging of the Earth's surface. However SA and Russia quickly entered quarrels about how the data would be distributed, since originally the data would be received from only Russian ground stations (!), stalling the project for many years. Apparently the situation was solved by building a ground station at SA. Nevertheless, the project is still under close scrutiny from the opposition parties of the South-African parliament as a huge waste of money (after all, the only military action SA is currently in are UN peacekeeping in Somalia and South Sudan).
Interesting, eh? :hmm:
RussianSpaceWeb.com: Kondor-E
