RSC Energia plans to switch over to using new “digital” Soyuz (spaceship with a digital control system) in 2012 for performing flights to the International Space Station (ISS), RIA Novosti reports with reference to the corporation’s president Vitaly Lopota.
"We have no flight noticing. We have been refining the software and there were some problems with astronaut’s panel. There were some wrinkles, but they are inevitable during the flight testing of new vehicles. The space has approved itself, I have no complaints and no reasons to change anything ", - he said, commenting the flight of first “digital” Soyuz, which has been started in 2010 (Soyuz TMA-M has started its flight to ISS on October 8th 2010 and it has separated from ISS on March 2011).
The launch of the second “digital” Soyuz TMA-02M spaceship to ISS is planned on June 8th 2011.
Lopota has noted that the next “digital” spaceships will be piloted only by test astronauts.
"I believe that only test men should fly the ships until we reach the fifth or sixth vehicle and we would carry out a hard selection of them. “We should fly the new ships next year", - he said.
He has also noted that the flights of the ships from previous series will also be continued.
"We will be carrying out the flights of the older ships. Since we need time to look around and see if we need something or maybe if we need to change something that is why we are interchanging ships. When we are confident in new ships’ reliability then we will switch to using only new ships”, - he said adding that “the new ships have a great dynamics”.
Soyuz TMA-M was the first spaceship from the new series developed and constructed by RSC Energia. Besides the replacement of airborne digital computer, the changes have been made in telemetric information transmission system: the new digital system has been installed instead of the analogue one. Soyuz TMA-M should replace the Soyuz-ТМА. Soyuz-TM ships have been performing flights to Mir before these ships.
The development of first spaceship from the Soyuz series has been started in Korolev design bureau in 1962. It was intended for refinement of rendock facilities, design and systems of the ship which provide the flight around Moon with the following return to the Earth.
The first manned flight on Soyuz-1 spaceship was performed on April 23rd-24th 1967 by astronaut Vladimir Komarov, but the flight has ended with a crash due to parachute system failure.
After carrying out an extra refinement of design and systems including two group orbital flights with automatic docking using proximity radio equipment IGLA (Kosmos-186 and Kosmos-188 – in October 1967, Kosmos-212 and Kosmos-213 – in April 1968) and a flight of the single ship (Kosmos-238), the regular flights of Soyuz ships have been started.
