Moscow. July 2. INTERFAX-The British company OneWeb plans to complete the deployment of the entire satellite constellation to provide global coverage by June 2022, the company said in a statement published on its website.
"On the way to full global coverage by June 2022 with a grouping of 648 satellites in low Earth orbit," OneWeb reported.
On the eve of the next batch of 36 communication satellites of the British company OneWeb successfully separated from the Fregat upper stage after the launch of the Soyuz-2.1 b carrier rocket from the Vostochny cosmodrome.
The last launch brought the number of OneWeb spacecraft in orbit to 254 units.
The rocket was launched on Thursday at 15: 48 Moscow time. This launch was the fourth at the cosmodrome this year.
OneWeb 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.
There are already more than a hundred such satellites in orbit, the first were launched into orbit in February 2019 from the Guiana Space Center (French Guiana).
In June 2015, Roscosmos signed a contract with Arianespace for 21 commercial launches of 672 communications satellites of the British OneWeb space system 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 talks on April 9 at Baikonur on concluding a new contract for the launch of the company's second generation of 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.
