Launch Of Russian Analog Of Starlink Postponed Due To Failure

The competition with Ilon Musk Russia lost at the start.

Russia has postponed the launch of the first batch of low-orbit broadband Internet access (BIA) satellites of 16 vehicles, which was to be carried out at the end of last year by Bureau 1440, writes "Kommersant". In September, Roscosmos head Dmitri Bakanov promised that by the end of 2025, the first 300 satellites for the constellation, which is to become an analog of Ilon Musk's Starlink system and provide "access to the Internet in any geographic location," will be deployed in orbit as part of the Rassvet project.

According to two interlocutors in the space market, the postponement of the launch of the first 16 vehicles to 2026 may be due to the fact that the required number of vehicles has not yet been assembled. For its part, Bureau 1440 said that the company is carrying out work "in accordance with the target dates" and promised to provide updates on the project's progress "as [stages] progress." "Exact launch dates and other sensitive information are not subject to disclosure," the statement said.

Despite the assumption of Kommersant's sources, in December, Deputy Head of the Russian Ministry of Digitization Dmitri Ugnivenko said that Bureau 1440 had produced the 16 satellites needed for launch last year.

The federal budget has allocated 102.8 billion rubles for the project within the framework of the national project "Data Economy". Bureau 1440 will allocate another 329 billion rubles from its own funds (until 2030).

In June 2025, Bakanov said that under the Rassvet project, more than 900 low-orbit satellites designed to provide broadband Internet access will be launched by 2035. Commercial operation of more than 250 of them is expected to begin in 2027. It is also planned to deploy more than 100 remote sensing satellites.

According to the description of the federal project "Infrastructure of Internet access" of the national project "Data Economy", 16 first satellites were to be put into orbit in 2025, in 2026 their number will reach 156, in 2027 - 292, and in 2028 - 318. For this purpose, it is planned to carry out 24 launches until 2030. Now only six Bureau 1440 satellites are deployed in orbit, launched as part of two experimental missions.

The Starlink network, developed by Ilon Musk's company SpaceX, has a group of more than 7,000 satellites deployed in orbit at an altitude of 550 kilometers.

In October, against the background of low rates of import substitution in the production of satellite systems, the head of JSC "Information Satellite Systems named after Academician M. F. Reshetnev", which is part of Roscosmos, was fired.

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