MOSCOW. Feb 12 (Interfax) - The landing site of the new spacecraft, Oryol, will be near Orenburg, the general design engineer at the TsENKI center for operation of ground control infrastructure, said.
"The TsENKI staff, together with the cooperation, picked a landing site for the reusable vehicle near the city of Orenburg," Alexei Bogomolov said in an interview with TsENKI's corporate magazine The Cosmodromes of Russia.
The Oryol reusable spaceship is being developed in Russia within the framework of the Federatsiya R&D project. The spaceship is due to perform its maiden unmanned flight in 2023, and the inaugural manned flight will follow in 2025. The spaceship will deliver crews and cargo to space stations in a near-Earth orbit. It also serves as a key element of the lunar exploration concept.
The spaceship will have up to four crewmembers. Its autonomous flight can last for up to 30 days, and the spaceship can operate for up to one year as part of an orbital station. The spaceship will have a mass of 14.4 tonnes when flying to an orbital station (19 tonnes when flying to the Moon), and the reentry vehicle's mass will amount to nine tonnes. The spaceship will have a length of 6.1 meters.