The R-29RM Shtil (Russian: Штиль, lit. ''"Calmness"'', NATO reporting name SS-N-23 Skiff) was a liquid propellant, submarine-launched ballistic missile in use by the Russian Navy. It had the alternate Russian designations RSM-54 and

GRAU index The Main Missile and Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (), commonly referred to by its transliterated Russian acronym GRAU (), is a department of the Russian Ministry of Defense. It is subordinate to the ...

3M27. It was designed to be launched from the

Delta IV Delta IV is a group of five expendable launch systems in the Delta rocket family introduced in the early 2000s. Originally designed by Boeing's Defense, Space and Security division for the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program, t ...

submarine, each of which is capable of carrying 16 missiles. The R-29RM could carry four 100 kiloton warheads and had a range of about . They were replaced with the newer R-29RMU2 Sineva and later with the enhanced variant R-29RMU2.1 Layner.

History

Development

Development of the R-29RM started in 1979 at the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau. The navy accepted the armament in 1986 and subsequently installed the D-9RM launch system consisting of a cluster of 16 R-29RM onboard the nuclear-propelled Project 667BDRM submarines.

Operation Behemoth

On 6 August 1991 at 21:09, K-407 , under the command of Captain Second Rank Sergey Yegorov, became the world's only submarine to successfully launch an all-missile salvo, launching 16 R-29RM (RSM-54) ballistic missiles of total weight of almost 700 tons in 244 seconds (operation code name "Behemoth-2"). All the missile hit their designated targets at the

Kura Missile Test Range Kura Missile Test Range ( rus, Ракетный полигон Кура́), originally known as ''Kama'', is a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile impact area located in northern Kamchatka Krai in the Russian Far East. It is the destinatio ...

Kamchatka The Kamchatka Peninsula (russian: полуостров Камчатка, Poluostrov Kamchatka, ) is a peninsula in the Russian Far East, with an area of about . The Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk make up the peninsula's eastern and west ...

Space Launch Vehicle

Several R-29RM were retrofitted as Shtill carrier rockets to be launched by Delta-class submarines, the submarines being mobile can send a payload directly into a heliosynchronic orbit, notably used by imaging satellites. Outside the confines of the Russian military, this capability has been used commercially to place three out of four microsatellites into a

low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an orbit around Earth with a period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial objects in outer space are in LEO, with an altitude never m ...

with one cancellation assigned to the Baikonur Cosmodrome for better financial terms.

End of service

The last boat carrying R-29RM, K-51 , went into refit to be rearmed with the newer R-29RMU Sineva on 23 August 2010.

Operators

Former operators

; * Russian Navy (1992-2010) ; * Soviet Navy (1986-1991)

References

External links

CSIS Missile Threat SS-N-23IDB RSM-54 (R-29RM) 3M37, SS-N-23 "Skiff" (Russian)
at the Center for Defense Information Submarine-launched ballistic missiles of Russia Cold War submarine-launched ballistic missiles of the Soviet Union Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau Military equipment introduced in the 1980s {{Missile-stub de:R-29#R-29RM