Vostochny Cosmodrome

보스토치니 우주기지

Russia's first civilian spaceport, built on the taiga plain of Amur Oblast. The Soyuz-2 pad has a flame trench, a service tower and lightning masts; rockets are rolled by rail from the long assembly-and-test building (MIK) to the pad.

See it on the 3D globe →

At a glance

Country: Russia
Location: Near Uglegorsk, Amur Oblast, Russia
Built: 2016
Height: 46 m
Type: Infrastructure

Quick answers

Where is Vostochny Cosmodrome?

Vostochny Cosmodrome is in Near Uglegorsk, Amur Oblast, Russia.

When was Vostochny Cosmodrome built?

Vostochny Cosmodrome was built in 2016.

The Vostochny Cosmodrome, whose name means 'Eastern Spaceport' in Russian, is Russia's civilian spaceport in the Amur Oblast, in the Russian Far East, above the 51st parallel north. It was started in 2011 so that Russia would rely less on the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which sits on land in Kazakhstan that Russia rents. Roscosmos, the state space corporation, runs it.

Its first launch was on 28 April 2016. The planned site is about 30 kilometres across, or about 551.5 square kilometres, and the master plan called for seven launch pads, including two for crewed missions. Its Soyuz-2 pad has a service tower, and rockets are moved to it by rail. The globe shows the pad with its tower, the long assembly building and the rail line.

Why this place?

President Vladimir Putin took part in picking the site. An earlier idea of building near Vladivostok on the Pacific coast was dropped because the damp, stormy weather could delay launches, so the project moved inland.

The chosen place is the old Svobodny Cosmodrome, a missile base set up by Boris Yeltsin in 1996. Only five spacecraft were launched from it before it closed in 2007. Its latitude lets rockets carry almost as much payload as from Baikonur at 46 degrees north.

Good for launching

The area is thinly populated and rockets can drop their lower stages over the ocean, about 600 to 800 kilometres away. It lies near the Baikal-Amur railway and the Chita-Khabarovsk highway. Plenty of local electricity is available to make hydrogen fuel.

The nearest city is Tsiolkovsky, and the nearest train station is Ledyanaya. The plan included over 400 buildings, 115 kilometres of roads and 125 kilometres of railways.

What it has launched

The first launch, on 28 April 2016, carried the gamma-ray astronomy satellite Mikhailo Lomonosov. In December 2020 and through 2021, Soyuz rockets from Vostochny launched batches of 36 OneWeb internet satellites into low Earth orbit.

On 10 August 2023 a Soyuz-2 launched the Luna 25 probe. It entered lunar orbit but later crashed into the Moon. Building was slow, with delays and cost problems, and a second pad for the Angara rocket was started in 2018.

Fun facts

The name Vostochny means 'eastern' in Russian.
Its first rocket launch took place on 28 April 2016.
It was built on the site of an older missile base, the Svobodny Cosmodrome.
The Luna 25 probe, launched from here in 2023, reached lunar orbit before crashing.