Russia began launching an analogue of Starlink into orbit
The first satellite of the Sphere communication system was launched late in the evening on October 22. The project will allow using the Internet in all small places
Updated at 16:11
Russia put into orbit the first satellite communication system “Sphere”, an analogue of Starlink and OneWeb. It is called Skif-D and is the first Russian satellite to operate at an altitude of about 8,000 kilometers. The experimental apparatus, in the future in orbit, is planned to implement another 599 of the same satellites.
Spacecraft “Skif” make it possible to make satellite Internet available in all sparsely populated areas where there are no land lines, allocated at Roscosmos. The Russian satellite Gonets-M was also put into orbit. They rate for nprovision of data and provision of mobile satellite communications services to mobile and fixed subscribers in any reception area.
launch The Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket at the Vostochny cosmodrome passed in the normal mode, the launch took place late in the evening on October 22.
Is it fair to compare the Russian project with the Starlink system? What tasks will the new satellite solve in the first place? Nathan Eismont, Leading Researcher at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, comments:
Nathan EismontLeading Researcher, Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The satellite is little reproduced in orbit, it must still turn on and start working. Whether this happened will be known. Leading Analyst of NPO RusBITech Alexander Golyshko:
– Dual purpose maybe. It is stated that this is the Internet, including, perhaps, like Elon Musk.
– Can the launch of 600 of the same ones be a little long?
– It depends on what specific satellites. Because Elon Musk had very small satellites that launched immediately after use. If I were developing such a system, I would also launch it first to see, check, test how it works, how the reception goes, what kind of reception is on Earth. It is an expensive pleasure to launch one satellite at a time with one launch vehicle, so there will probably be groups. So far, Roskosmos has succeeded in everything. It will finally become known that when the satellites begin to work normally, they also need to be revealed, to work, such problems also happen with us and not with us.
– Do the Sfera and Gonets-M satellites have slightly different functionality?
— Messenger is a very old project. While the “Messenger” was being developed, technologies went ahead, the speeds were different on the Internet, now it has been modernized. Surely there is some kind of special application, it is unlikely that they will talk about it. There are foreign analogues, we will certainly have some things that can be found better.
The mass of the Skif-D satellite is less than 200 kilograms, power consumption is about 250 watts, and the validity period is three years.
President Vladimir Putin announced Sphere project back in 2018. The government reports that 58.5 billion rubles will be allocated to it in 2022-2025. Two years ago project cost evaluated 1.5 trillion rubles, but Dmitry Rogozin received 800 billion rubles from the head of Roskosmos. He spokethat 500 billion rubles will go to the project from extrabudgetary funds. The current head of the state corporation Yuri Borisov named “Sphere” from several projects for Roskosmos.
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