Russia working on satellite constellation
November 17, 2022
By Chris Forrester
Russia is working on Skif, the name of a proposed satellite constellation to rival the likes of Elon Musk’s Starlink and Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper.
Russia’s TASS news agency reports that Skif is planned to commence deployment around the planet in 2025.
Russia’s Skif satellite constellation is being developed to provide cheap and high-speed internet access across the country. On October 22nd, scientists launched the Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with three Gonets-M satellites and a Skif-D module under the Sfera programme from the Vostochny space centre and completed the system’s testing and payload demo.
The start of the Skif system’s deployment is scheduled to begin in 2025, “with the launch of two Skif satellite prototypes,” Reshetnev Information Satellite Systems (ISS) company’s Yevgeny Nesterov said in an interview.
“Flight trials, when complete, will be followed by experiments in establishing communication channels, with regard to the Doppler effect and variable delay,” the scientist added.