Launch
Vehicles The current stable of Russian space launch vehicles consists of six distinct types of boosters, with variations
within each class. Three different nomenclature schemes exist for classifying these
vehicles: Russia's own method, a letter code developed by the U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS), and the once-classified space launcher (SL) code of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. While the SL scheme is the most complete, the CRS scheme includes indicators of relationships between several variants of the same design. The Russian scheme uses the name of each booster's main payload, so that the existence of some boosters with purely military
payloads goes unacknowledged. (See Table 1.) The long-awaited Energiya, the so-called "super booster," made its debut on May 15, 1987. It consists of a hydrogen-fueled central core stage and four liquid-fuel strap-on engines. Payloads of up to 100 metric tons can be carried into space attached to the side of Energiya's core stage. But after a second flight, carrying the unmanned Buran ("Blizzard") space shuttle, on Nov. 15, 1988, this mighty rocket was mothballed for want of other paying customers. Russian space officials have designed a smaller Energiya-M for possible commercial use. Meanwhile, plans for manned orbital flights of the Buran shuttle were canceled under the budget crisis associated with the collapse of the Soviet regime. In early 1993 the Russians launched a small test satellite, Start-1, into orbit atop a converted ICBM. Numerous plans were developed to use other surplus military missiles to carry small satellites for Western customers.