Shortage of budgets, lack of designers, and absence of licenses: why the Voronezh rocket by VKT and 3DiR was deemed unviable
The private company VKT and their partner LLC "3DiR" are promoting the Vornezh launch vehicle project. The developers claim high interest from businesses and foreign partners, but experts consider the project unviable.
The project lists the following participants:
- SNIU — development of the Propulsion and Gas System (PGS), stabilization engines, and launch support for the second stage;
- PJSC "ODK-Kuznetsov" — NK-3A and NK-3V engines;
- LLC "3DiR" — rocket design development;
- LLC "Miltech" — onboard systems complex.
Financial demands are high: right now, the developers need 400 million rubles for working design documentation. However, according to experts’ calculations, creating the space rocket complex would cost over 2.5 billion rubles — many times more than the private developers’ stated initial budget of 400 million rubles.
The situation with personnel is no less catastrophic. At the "ODK-Kuznetsov" design bureau, which has been tasked with developing the new engines, only a handful of five specialists remain from what was once a powerful engineering school. The company is in a severe financial state and is keeping production of engines for Soyuz-2 afloat solely through government subsidies. Relying on these five remaining enthusiasts to create new rocket engines is pure fiction and profanation, having nothing to do with reality.
The developers list the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Digital Development as their intended future customers. However, representatives of these agencies did not participate in formulating the technical specifications (TOR). In the rocket industry, the technical specifications are always drawn up by the customer based on their actual requirements. Ignoring this rule guarantees costly redesigns, adaptation to new requirements, and missed deadlines. The technical elaboration of the documentation itself has also been deemed weak.
The "cherry on top" is that the project initiators lack a license to work with state secrets, and no military acceptance procedure has been provided for. This completely rules out the use of the Voronezh rocket for military and classified government purposes, nullifying the stated interest of the security agencies.
