Russian, Chinese journalists visit new Far Eastern spaceport

VOSTOCHNY SPACEPORT, June 28. /TASS/. Participants of the Russian-Chinese media tour, organized by TASS and China’s Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), visited a technical complex and a launch pad of the Vostochny spaceport in Russia’s Far East on Tuesday. "The meeting of journalists of two countries at the cosmodrome shows our openness and drive to develop international cooperation," deputy director of a branch of Russian space agency Roscosmos Alexander Molchanov told a TASS correspondent. The journalists first arrived in Uglegorsk, a village that will soon become part of the Tsiolkovsky science city, where they visited a cosmonautics museum and saw monuments to Russian cosmonaut and first man in space Yuri Gagarin and rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and also a Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft. The next stop was a technical complex designed for the preparation of a carrier rocket and assembly of the fourth stage. The journalists also saw the work of a unique transborder gallery used for the transportation of carrier rocket components between buildings in the course of pre-launch preparations. The "space program" ended by a visit to the Tsiolkovsky science city currently under construction. The construction of the Vostochny space center in the Amur region began in 2010. A Soyuz-2.1 a rocket was successfully launched from the Vostochny spaceport for the first time on April 28. Vostochny occupies an area of about 700 sq. km. It is destined to become the first national facility for civilian space launches, ensuring Russia’s full-scale access to outer space and reducing the dependence of the Russian space industry on the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. Read more