Moscow. July 31. INTERFAX-The launch of the Soyuz rocket with communication satellites of the British company OneWeb from the Baikonur cosmodrome is scheduled for mid-August, the head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin said.
"The next launch of Soyuz-2.1 b with 36 OneWeb satellites is scheduled from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on August 20," Rogozin wrote in his telegram channel.
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.
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 negotiations on April 9 at Baikonur on concluding 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.