KYIV. Jan 3 (Interfax-AVN) - The Ukrainian space industry registered the production growth of 15 to 17 percent in 2001, Alexander Negoda, head of the Ukrainian National Space Agency, said on Friday citing early estimates.
Negoda outlined the main events of 2001 in an interview with Interfax-Military News Agency. He singled out six successful launches of Zenit-3SL booster rockets from a sea platform from March to May, the launch of the Tsiklon-3 booster with the AUOS- SM-KF spacecraft from Russia's Plesetsk cosmodrome in July and three launches of booster rockets in December. According to him, a Zenit-2 and a Tsiklon-2 were launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and a Tsiklon-3 from Plesetsk in December.
Ukraine launches space rockets of five types from foreign cosmodromes, the director said. These are Tsiklon-2, Tsiklon-3, Zenit-2, Zenit-3SL and Dnepr rockets.
Speaking about the plans for 2002, Negoda said that Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada (parliament) would soon consider the draft of the third national space program. The peculiarity of the program is that it envisages financing of about 50 percent of space projects from the national budget, while the rest should be financed from extra-budget sources.
According to Negoda, Ukraine will continue implementing the Sea Launch, Dnepr and Coronas international space programs and will launch the Sych-1M spacecraft in 2002. He said the Tsiklon-4 project was among the most promising ones.
"We will have to do an enormous job to develop this missile system and promote it on the global market of launch services," Negoda stressed.