NK-33 – Spaceflight Now

Mysterious Russian reconnaissance satellite successfully launched

April 2, 2018

A small spacecraft built for the Russian military lifted off Thursday on top of a modified Soyuz booster, beginning a mission to reportedly test a compact Earth-imaging platform that could be used on future spy satellites.

Secret Russian satellite launched from Plesetsk Cosmodrome

June 23, 2017

A modified version of Russia’s Soyuz rocket launched Friday from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a spaceport on the edge of the Russian Arctic, with a military satellite whose mission is shrouded in mystery.

Russian military satellites orbited by stripped-down Soyuz rocket

December 6, 2015

A Russian satellite reportedly designed to track enemy submarines and a spacecraft to help calibrate ground-based military radars lifted off Saturday aboard a modified Soyuz rocket, but one of the payloads apparently failed to deploy from the launcher’s upper stage, according to Russian media.

Two Antares failure probes produce different results

November 1, 2015

An Orbital ATK investigation into last year’s Antares rocket crash in Virginia identified a decades-old manufacturing defect inside an AJ26 engine turbopump as the most likely cause of the failure, but a team of NASA engineers was not so sure in their report.