Moscow. September 15th. INTERFAX.RU – The program for creating the global satellite constellation “Sphere” should be adopted by the end of this year, in the coming weeks it should be presented to the President of the Russian Federation, said the head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin.
“I hope that the program as a whole should be adopted by the end of this year. We are preparing to present this program to the government and the President of the Russian Federation in the coming weeks,” Rogozin told reporters.
According to him, in 2022-2023, the first flight samples of spacecraft will be created, which will be sent into orbit.
On June 15, Yuri Urlichich, the first deputy general director of Roscosmos for the development of the orbital constellation and promising projects, announced that the program of the global satellite constellation Sphere in June would be submitted for consideration to the government.
On June 7, at a session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Rogozin announced that the cost of the Sphere global satellite system program would amount to 800 billion rubles. The 500 billion rubles for the program comes from private investment, said the head of Roscosmos.
In October 2020, Rogozin announced that Russia would begin deploying a satellite constellation as part of the Sphere global communications program in 2021.
Earlier, Urlichich said that the state corporation, as part of the Sphere global communications project, would create an “Internet of things” in space. The first devices demonstrating this technology will appear in 2022.
Sphere project
In July 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the Sphere project, which provides for the creation of a global network of 600 satellites to provide the territory of the Russian Federation and other countries with Internet and telephone communications. Its competitors are considered similar projects by OneWeb and SpaceX.
Within the framework of the system, it is planned to combine the GLONASS satellite navigation system, Earth remote sensing systems, the Express-RV and Gonets satellite communication systems, as well as a number of other communication and Internet access systems.
