Tests of the Bulava missile will be resumed no earlier than November this year. It was not possible to reliably identify the reason for the previous unsuccessful launches, and now the RF Ministry of Defense hopes to do this by a new method - by launching three "absolutely identical" missiles one after the other. This was announced yesterday by the head of the Russian military department Anatoly Serdyukov. Earlier, the main headquarters of the Navy announced that the next test cycle of the Bulava would begin at the end of June.
The 3M30 Bulava is a sea-based strategic ballistic missile. Designed for arming Project 955 Borey nuclear submarines, the first of which, Yuri Dolgoruky, is already being tested. The range of the rocket is about 8 thousand km. According to the data of the Russian Federation, declared under the START-1 treaty, the Bulava is equipped with six warheads.
According to the Minister of Defense, the problem with unsuccessful missile launches is the quality of their assembly. Let us remind you that out of 12 Bulava launches, seven were unsuccessful, and three more were considered "partially successful." The last unsuccessful launch was made from the Dmitry Donskoy heavy strategic submarine (project 941U Akula) on December 9, 2009 (see Kommersant on December 10).
Then, unofficially, the failure of the third stage was declared the cause of the failure of the Ministry of Defense. As Mr. Serdyukov noted in a comment to the RIA Novosti news agency, now "three absolutely identical" Bulava missiles are being created. This, in his opinion, will help: “We hope that this will allow us to accurately find the error, if any, since it should be repeated in all three missiles. Now we are working on how to control the assembly process so that we the missiles are identical. " The tests themselves will not be resumed in the summer, as was repeatedly promised earlier, but only in the fall. "By November, I think we will be able to start rocket launches," the minister said.
Two weeks ago, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, Fleet Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky, promised on May 20 to make public all the reasons for the failure of the last Bulava launch. However, this did not happen.
As the former chief of the main headquarters of the strategic missile forces, retired colonel-general Viktor Yesin, explained to Kommersant, they really wanted to continue testing the rocket in the summer. However, recently a meeting of a special interdepartmental commission of the Ministry of Defense and representatives of the military-industrial complex took place, at which it was decided to postpone them. According to Mr. Yesin, the postponement of the tests is due to the fact that the commission has established "serious inconsistencies in the general cooperation on the Bulava project", related enterprises are supplying substandard equipment for the missile. Nevertheless, Viktor Yesin is sure that there is no alternative to the Bulava, "the missile must be carried through to the end," especially since he considers its design to be "workable."
"The problem of Bulava is the problem of the quality of the elements supplied for it, it leaves much to be desired," says Andrei Frolov, an expert at the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies. And the chief designer of Bulava, Academician Yuri Solomonov (who recently made his debut as a prose writer with the story "Nuclear Vertical" about the plight of a rocket engineer), repeated in April that the main reasons for unsuccessful rocket launches are defective materials, violation of technologies in the production of a rocket and lack of quality control. But neither he nor the military said so clearly what specific "materials" or "technologies" they
suspect.
