MIK RN/MIK 112

The Energiya assembly building is now run by the Samara-based TsSKB/Progress organization. As mentioned earlier, the three high bays were rendered useless by the roof collapse in May 2002, which among other hardware destroyed the only flown Buran orbiter. In 2004 the Russian Space Agency earmarked funds to refurbish high Bay 3 for processing future satellites built by TsSKB/Progress, but there are no signs that any work is being done. No plans have been announced for repairing the other two high bays and these may be demolished. By the end of 2006 the debris from the roof collapse had reportedly still not been cleared.

Low bay 1 now houses the processing area for Soyuz launch vehicles flying from pad 5 (the “Gagarin pad”) on Site 1, which is now used for Soyuz and Progress launches to the International Space Station and also for occasional launches of civilian satellites built by TsSKB/Progress (Foton, Resurs). Soyuz rockets destined for the Gagarin pad used to be assembled in the old MIK-2B building in the center of the cosmodrome. Although the new assembly hall is much roomier than MIK-2B, it is much farther away from the Gagarin pad, making the roll-out procedure more cumbersome. The roll-out now takes about 2 hours, compared with 30 minutes in the old days. The first vehicle to be rolled out from the modified low bay 1 was Progress M1-10 in June 2003.

Low bay 2 was modified in the late 1990s to process payloads for Starsem, a Russian/European company founded in 1996 by Arianespace, EADS SPACE, TsSKB/Progress, and the Russian Space Agency to commercially market the Soyuz launch vehicle. There are three Starsem clean rooms here: a 286 m2 Payload Processing Facility (PPF) with two independent control rooms to permit parallel operations, a 285 m2 Hazardous Processing Facility (HPF) to fill satellites with toxic hypergolic propellants, and a 587 m2 Upper Composite Integration Facility (UCIF) for integration with the Fregat upper stage and upper fairing encapsulation. Mating of the upper composite with the first three stages of the Soyuz launch vehicle takes place in the Soyuz assembly building on Site 31 on the “right flank” of the cosmo­drome. Starsem exclusively flies from pad 6, situated on Site 31 [79].