OREANDA-NEWS According to Dmitry Baranov, acting General Director of the Samara Progress Rocket and Space Center, his company's specialists have started the preliminary design of an innovation in the field of space technologies, the result of which is the Amur-LNG. It will be a new reusable spacecraft which runs on liquefied natural gas .

It became known about the signing of a contract for the development of a preliminary design in early October 2020. The project is going to be completed by its developers by the end of 2020; and it cost Roscosmos a considerable sum of money - 407 million rubles.

In August, the company's management announced their plans to create a fundamentally new Soyuz-LNG launch vehicle with a reusable first stage that will surpass SpaceX's Falcon 9 in terms of the estimated number of launches.

The developers say that this middle class rocket will be a two-stage one. It will be able to launch impressive 9.5 tons of cargo into low-earth orbit from the Vostochny cosmodrome with the reusable first stage and 12 tons with a single one, and into the geo-transfer orbit - 2.5 tons using the Fregat upper stage and the reusable stage. The launch cost will be about $ 22-35 million, it will depend on its configuration.

The launch complex for the new reusable Amur-LNG rocket is based at the Vostochny cosmodrome, and it is able to provide 15 launches per year, taking into account the inter-flight service of the reusable first stage.