Moscow. November 26. INTERFAX - Roscosmos has started the creation of the Sphere satellite system, said Alexander Bloshenko, executive Director of the State Corporation for Science.
"This year we started the Sphere program. Money is already planned in the federal budget, until 2024," Bloshenko said at the Photovoltaics-2021 industry meeting.
On November 20, the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, announced that the state corporation had received the first funds for the implementation of the project.
Earlier, Rogozin reported that in 2022-2023, the first flight samples of the Sphere spacecraft will be created, which will be sent into orbit.
On June 15, the first Deputy Director General of Roscosmos for the development of the orbital constellation and promising projects, Yuri Urlich, announced that the program of the global satellite constellation Sphere will be submitted to the government in June.
On June 7, at the session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Rogozin announced that the cost of the global satellite system "Sphere" program will amount to 800 billion rubles. 500 billion rubles of program costs are accounted for by private investments, Rogozin said.
In October 2020, Rogozin announced that Russia would begin deploying a satellite constellation as part of the Sphere global communications program in 2021.
Urlich previously reported that the state corporation within the framework of the global communications project "Sphere" will create an "Internet of things" in space. The first demonstrators of this technology will appear in 2022.
In July 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the Sphere project, which provides for the creation of a global network of 600 satellites to provide the territory of the Russian Federation and other countries with Internet and telephone communications. Its competitors are similar projects of OneWeb and SpaceX.