The Kourou-cosmonaut connection

Creating the 30-meter-deep flame trench under the launch pad required excavating 200,000 cubic meters of earth — about a quarter of it granite rocks that required dynamiting. French engineers installed a rock crusher that reduced the granite to gravel that was used in the foundation and for the 30 thousand cubic meters of concrete that will be needed. The entire construction project is expected to cost almost $500 million, a third of it invested by Russia.

French space officials expect to make about four commercial launches per year to start, each costing customers $50 million. Due to its equatorial location, the launch site will allow the booster to carry more than twice its normal payload to the 'cash cow' geostationary orbits around the equator.

Special Russian launch pad processing equipment will be shipped to Kourou beginning late this year. By next summer, the first two flight vehicles will be delivered for launch preparation. Preliminary plans considered a special 'river-sea' vessel that would take the cargo from the factory on the Volga River through the Russian canal system to the Black Sea, then through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic. But according to Panarin, a new route has been selected. "The rockets will be manufactured in Samara, then delivered to St. Petersburg by train," he explained last week. "Then to French Guiana by sea over a period of about two weeks."

The Director General of the 'Progress' rocket factory in Samara (called 'Kuybyshev' in Soviet days), Alexander Kirilin, said the booster has undergone a number of hardware changes required by Kourou operations.

"High humidity, rain seasons, aggressive insects and other factors may prevent the vehicle from normal and stable operation," he said. "Still, Soyuz operates properly in the temperature ranges from 40 degrees below zero to 40 degrees above zero Celsius in Russia."

French range safety practices require a ground-commanded engine shutoff capability, which has been added. The fuel tanks in the discarded first stage sections now have an automatic post-shutdown valve open command so they can quickly fill with water and sink if they reach the ocean surface intact.

Vladimir Klimov, the "first deputy general director" of the Barmin General Machine-Building Design Bureau that has built all Russian missile launch pads for the last 50 years, also told reporters that the pad facilities would be designed to be operated by a launch team of 98 people. They would fly in from Russia for the 'launch campaign' lasting a month or two. A skeleton staff of 15 specialists would be permanently in residence between launch campaigns.

This is just the way that 'Soyuz' launch operations are conducted at Baykonur. The big difference, aside from the jungles, is that at least at first man-rated vehicles won't be involved. But that is very likely to change in the next decade.

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