Russia puts first internet satellites into orbit as SpaceX rival

Russia’s Bureau 1440 space company launched 16 broadband Internet satellites, marking an early operational step in a low-Earth orbit network that Russian officials have cast as a domestic version of SpaceX’s Starlink.

The satellites were launched at 8:24 p.m. on Monday and are now under the direction of the company’s mission control center after reaching their reference orbit, Bureau 1440 said, Bloomberg quotes.

“The launch of the first satellites in the target constellation marks the transition from experiments to the creation of a communications service,” the company said.

The launch is part of Russia’s broader Rassvet project, which it plans to scale up sharply over the next several years as Moscow seeks to build a sovereign satellite Internet network comparable in concept, though not yet in scale, to billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Starlink.

Bureau 1440 said it took 1,000 days from its first experimental launch to the deployment of the satellite group. “Ahead lie dozens of launches and hundreds of satellites,” it said.

Starlink has become a crucial part of the war in Ukraine. Officials in Kyiv said in February that, after working with SpaceX, they’d moved to a “white list” system that kept legitimate Ukrainian terminals online while blocking suspected Russian ones that were unauthorized.

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