Work at Russia's new $3 billion spaceport in the Far East has ground to a halt after a critical piece of infrastructure was discovered to have been built to the wrong dimensions, and would not fit the latest version of the country's Soyuz rocket, a news report said.
The Vostochny Cosmodrome, under construction in the Amur region, north of China, is intended to become Russia's primary spaceport, replacing the Soviet-built Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The cutting-edge facility was meant be ready for launches of Soyuz-2 rockets in December, but an unidentified space agency official told the TASS news agency late Thursday that the rocket would not fit inside the assembly building where its parts are stacked and tested before launch.
The building "has been designed for a different modification of the Soyuz rocket," the source said, according to news website Medusa, which picked up the story from TASS.
The quote could not be found on TASS, a state-owned news agency on Friday. TASS's report instead quoted a spokesperson for the Center for Ground-based Space Infrastructure (TsENKI) - a federal space agency organ tasked the managing with Vostochny cosmodrome.
"Work with the rocket at the integration and testing complex now can not be conducted because the facility is not ready," the spokesperson said in the report. "There are still imperfections in the construction."
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