Moscow. June 7. INTERFAX-Roscosmos expects sanctions pressure aimed at depriving the state corporation of a new contract with OneWeb, said the general director of the state corporation Dmitry Rogozin.
"After the withdrawal of the first generation of this system, we will probably be prohibited from doing this by directive, and the contract will go to Comrade Mask," Rogozin said at a hearing in the State Duma.
OneWeb's low-orbit spacecraft are designed to provide ground-based consumers with high-speed Internet directly via satellite communications. Roscosmos plans to conduct ten launches with such spacecraft in 2021.
In June 2015, Roscosmos signed a contract with Arianespace for 21 commercial launches of 672 communications satellites of the space system of the British company OneWeb on Soyuz-2 launch vehicles with Fregat family upper stages from the Baikonur, Vostochny, and Kourou cosmodromes in French Guiana. The contract value was $1.2 billion.
On April 23, Rogozin said that the state corporation and OneWeb held negotiations on April 9 at Baikonur on the conclusion of a new contract for the launch of the second generation of the company's devices.
Earlier, the first deputy head of Roscosmos for finance, Maxim Ovchinnikov, said in an interview with Interfax that the state corporation expects to conclude a contract with OneWeb to launch second-generation satellites.
"We will do everything to get this contract," Ovchinnikov said.
