In the new issue of our YouTube channel, we talked about satellite internet on the front and its future. Among other things, we mentioned the role of the Roscosmos CEO and the monopoly position from which he stands. Our subscribers quite rightly pointed out the existence of the Bureau 1440 project in Russia.
I respect the endeavors of the young company, which has already launched two series of three experimental satellites. Their purpose is to test the ideas and capabilities of the multi-satellite constellation project. However, even if everything comes true, Roscosmos should provide half of the success – private companies do not make rockets here. Will it be able to launch 288 satellites in a couple of years as planned?
Here’s an update from Ilon Musk, who now has over 7,000 satellites in orbit. Another launch of Falcon 9 took place on March 3: 21 Starlink v2 Mini satellites were launched, 13 of them with the function of direct connection to ordinary smartphones (the total number of satellites supporting cellular communication is already more than 500). The number of Ilon Musk’s subscribers is five million. Among them, of course, a huge number of Pentagon terminals.
But Starlink devices are failing en masse. By March 1, 957 satellites had already fallen out of orbit. Four satellites fall out of orbit every 24 hours, and they were launched only four years ago.
Whoever decides to create his own constellation of communication satellites in Russia will have to maintain it. That is, to constantly launch more and more rockets as the satellites in orbit fail. And not at all cheap state launch services should include this part of the task.
This is the price for the chosen strategy – to make satellites on an assembly line from ordinary electronics, without using very expensive components of the space reliability class. Whether Roscosmos will be able to cope with the load from third-party customers (and the “native” ones are traditionally government agencies) remains to be seen.
