Russian officials say the launch of an Angara rocket, the country's first new space vehicle design since the Soviet years, was scrubbed just seconds before its scheduled blastoff time.

Technical issues caused the launch to be aborted, they said.

The flight computer aboard the rocket automatically triggered a launch abort just before liftoff, military commander Lieutenant General Alexander Golovko said.

Another attempt would be make Saturday, said Golovko, commander of Air and Space Defense Forces in Russia.

"The automatic system aborted the launch during the countdown," he said.

The reason for the abort had not yet been determined, he added.

The Angara rocket is considered the cornerstone of Russian President Valdimir Putin's effort to modernize the country's aerospace industry and begin launching space missions from a space port under construction in the far east of the country.

That would release Russia from having to rely on the Baikonur launch complex it leases in Kazakhstan and from foreign suppliers of equipment and technology.

Angara will be launched from within Russia's borders from the northern military cosmodrome in Plesetsk, along a suborbital flight path above Russia's Arctic coastline.

Russia's space industry has spent most of the last 20 years using Soviet-era technology in an effort to keep the country's space program afloat in the face of budget cuts and a brain drain of its best designers and engineers.

The Angara rocket is the industry's first fully new design since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

"This is the first launch vehicle that has been developed and built from scratch in Russia," said Igor Lissov, an expert on the space industry with the trade journal Novosti Kosmonovatiki. "Everything else we have is a modernization of our Soviet legacy."

Seen as a possible commercial rival to U.S. company SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and the launch vehicles from Arianespace in France, the Angara is designed to launch payloads up to 25 tons.

It will likely take a decade for the Russian rocket to become commercially competitive, says Anatoly Zak, editor of the Russianspaceweb industry website.

"Twenty years of development is over but we are at the very beginning of the flight testing," he says.

The Angara project has suffered from long delays and burgeoning costs, he says. "It became extremely overpriced."

The company building Angara, the Khrunichev Space Center, is the same firm that built the Proton series of rockers that experienced an embarrassing series of launch failures.

There are concerns the Angara rocket, named after a river in Siberia, could experience similar difficulties, Zak says.

"There is absolutely no guarantee that Angara, which is built by the same industry, by the same company, by the same people, will be immune to these problems," he says.