{"id":153856,"date":"2025-09-19T07:22:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T07:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/153856\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T07:22:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T07:22:06","slug":"russias-space-chief-touts-rapid-development-of-starlink-rival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/153856\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia\u2019s Space Chief Touts ‘Rapid’ Development of Starlink Rival"},"content":{"rendered":"

With more than 6 million<\/a> active users, SpaceX\u2019s Starlink has become the world\u2019s leading provider of high-speed satellite internet. That prominence has sparked some rivalry, and not least with other world powers\u2014including Russia.<\/p>\n

In a televised interview on Wednesday, the head of Russia\u2019s Roscosmos space agency said it is pushing full steam ahead on an alternative to Starlink, Reuters reported<\/a>. Dmitry Bakanov said that Roscosmos has partnered with Bureau 1440, a Russian aerospace company, to develop a low-Earth orbit satellite system for global broadband data delivery.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeveral test vehicles in orbit have already been inspected and the production ones have been modified accordingly,\u201d Bakanov said. \u201cWe are also moving at a rapid pace in this direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Can Roscosmos catch up to SpaceX? <\/p>\n

Starlink operates the world\u2019s largest satellite constellation: As of August 1, there were 8,075 operational Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit, according to Harvard University astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who tracks<\/a> the megaconstellation on his website. That is more than half of all the satellites believed to be in orbit around our planet.<\/p>\n

SpaceX\u2019s network provides high-speed broadband internet to a variety of consumers, including businesses and governments\u2014perhaps most notably, to Ukraine. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv has received more than 50,000 Starlink terminals<\/a> to help it maintain military communications and drone operations, according to one Ukrainian official speaking in April of this year.<\/p>\n

SpaceX has built its constellation over the course of six years, launching its Falcon 9 rockets hundreds of times over that period. As such, Elon Musk\u2019s company has a solid head start over Bureau 1440, which launched its first experimental Rassvet-1 satellites in 2023, according to Space Voyaging<\/a>. These satellites are part of Project \u201cDawn,\u201d the company\u2019s challenger to Starlink.<\/p>\n

Bureau 1440 developed its satellites over the course of three years and, according to Bakanov, the company has cleared some key validation hurdles.<\/p>\n

When will Project Dawn launch? <\/p>\n

Its first batch of satellites is scheduled to launch at the end of 2025, he said, according to Izvestia<\/a>, a Russian daily newspaper. Still, with thousands of Starlinks already in orbit and more launching every week, Project Dawn would need to scale at an unprecedented rate to catch up.<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s motivation for challenging SpaceX\u2019s dominance in low-Earth orbit is likely strategic. Having its own high-speed satellite internet constellation would strengthen its military communications and drone operations. Bakanov suggested that Project Dawn will allow Russia to control drones with greater accuracy, according to Izvestia.<\/p>\n

But again, as Starlink showed, building a satellite megaconstellation doesn\u2019t happen overnight, and Bureau 1440 still has a long way to go. What is clear, however, is that Russia is committed to enhancing its satellite communications capabilities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With more than 6 million active users, SpaceX\u2019s Starlink has become the world\u2019s leading provider of high-speed satellite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":153857,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,2016,128,285,5437,5707],"class_list":{"0":"post-153856","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-russia","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-space","13":"tag-spacex","14":"tag-starlink"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}