Space Forum / Shuttle / March 2005

The program name is Oural, not Orel.
Unfortunately, all the news I've read on the subject are in French.
You will get the most precise information in english here:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=15807

The release from the russian size is quite uninteresting:
http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?prd_id=160&msg_id=5462807&startrow=1&find=france

In a nutshell, this is a collaboration program with the Russian federal
agency, which serves the main purpose of keeping the french engineers
and scientists from the french launcher division at CNES busy. As the
main development of Ariane 5 has reached an end with the successful
return to flight of the ECA version in February, and no other future
launcher is being developped, work is being done to test some
technologies and be ready to decide in 2012 what the successor to Ariane
5 will be. The successor is planned for 2020, with the objective of
halving the cost of access to orbit compared to the last versions of
Ariane 5.
The most interesting pieces of hardware which are being studied are a
methane LOX engine developped with Russia, named Volga, and a reentry
demonstrator called Pre-X, build by EADS ST, whick should be launched by
a russian rocket.
An artist view of Pre-x can be seen here:
http://www.space.eads.net/web1/multimedia/picture_list.asp?nom_arbo=Future$launc
h$vehicles$%3E$PRE$X
(Sorry for the long link)

I hope this will answer your questions,
Sincerely,
Cyrille Vanlerberghe

Bjørn Ove Isaksen a écrit :