Swords to Plowshares
Originally designed for carrying nuclear warheads... the Rockot ...shepherd[ed] the satellite into an orbit approximately 800 km above the surface of the Earth.
I much prefer this use over the original. Drinks all around.
Russia and China celebrated a pair of successful launches this week, with a Rockot booster placing Sentinel-3B into orbit while China's Long March 11 lobbed five imaging sats into space. The launch for the European Space Agency (ESA) on Wednesday evening from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome added to the growing Copernicus fleet with a …
If the main stages are all solid fuel then the final stage (or the payload) has to have liquid fueled thrusters to make up for the inevitable inaccuracies in the solid fuel stages. (A few kilograms of fuel on a 1000kg satellite can make up for a considerable inaccuracy in the main stages burns. As the satellite is already in orbit, high powered rockets are not needed - just relatively large fuel tanks.)
How do they achieve an accurate orbital insertion with no throttling ability at all?
Selective steering to waste energy? You don't have to follow an optimal, energy-minimizing flight path to orbit if you have excess solid fuel to burn. You can take flight paths with unnecessarily high or low inclinations, or even use "energy management maneuvers" like Lockheed-Martin's THAAD.
And the final satellite, if not an upper orbit insertion stage, will be able to throttle and maneuver to a desired orbit.
I wonder if this means that they've nabbed the assets of the now defunct Sea Launch company.
...that the Arctic ocean is becoming littered with ex-SS-19 (a.k.a. UR-100NU, 15A35) intercontinental ballistic missile boosters leaking left-over hydrazine into the environment?
Ref 'The News': "The launch vessel, a former SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missile, is powered by hydrazine - a fuel so toxic and carcinogenic that almost every space program in the world, including Russia's, no longer uses it. The spent rocket stage is expected to contain up to a tonne of unused hydrazine."