Zenit Launch Vehicle
Yuzhnoye Design Bureau (KB Pivdenne)
Medium-lift orbital launch vehicle family designed by Yuzhnoye, flown as Zenit-2 from Baikonur and as the sea-launched Zenit-3SL.
Technical specifications
- Height
- 57–59.6 m
- Diameter
- 3.9 m
- Liftoff mass
- 444,900–462,200 kg
- Payload to LEO (Zenit-2)
- 13,740 kg
- Payload to GTO (Zenit-3SL)
- 6,000 kg
- Stages
- 2 or 3, depending on variant
- First flight
- 13 April 1985
- Status
- Suspended
About
The Zenit is a medium-lift launch vehicle family designed by Yuzhnoye Design Bureau and manufactured by Pivdenmash (Yuzhmash) in Dnipro, Ukraine. First flown in 1985 as the two-stage Zenit-2 from Baikonur Cosmodrome, the family was later expanded into the three-stage Zenit-3SL, which used a Block DM-SL upper stage and was launched from the Odyssey floating platform in the Pacific Ocean as part of the international Sea Launch consortium, as well as the land-based Zenit-3SLB and Zenit-3F variants flown from Baikonur. Zenit vehicles used RD-171/RD-120 series engines burning kerosene and liquid oxygen and were noted for their high degree of automation and relatively low ground-processing time for their era. The program has been effectively suspended since the Russo-Ukrainian war began in 2014, with production halted due to the severed cooperation between Ukrainian design/manufacturing and Russian upper-stage and launch-service partners, and further disrupted by damage to Ukrainian industrial facilities after 2022.
Documentation
No public datasheet yet — request the datasheet / ICD from the supplier.
