(super rocket to the right, canceled)
Facing significant budgetary pressures, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, has indefinitely postponed its ambitious effort to develop a super-heavy rocket to rival NASA's next-generation Space Launch System, SLS.
Instead, Russia will focus on radical upgrades of its brand-new but smaller Angara-5 rocket which had its inaugural flight in Dec. 2014, the agency's Scientific and Technical Council, NTS, decided on Thursday, Mar. 12.
The cost-cutting move to halt the development of the super-rocket, which is still on a drawing board in Russia, came just a day after a spectacular test firing in the US of a large solid-rocket booster intended for the SLS.
Both countries planned to use new enormous rockets almost exclusively for human missions into deep space, as such vehicles' capability of carrying around 80 tons of payload to the low Earth orbit far outweighs any commercial or military cargo. As a result, the costly project came under fire in Moscow last year, as the nation faced sagging oil prices and Western economic sanctions resulting from the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine.
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