Moscow. December 15th. INTERFAX - Six launches from Russian cosmodromes and one from the spaceport in French Guiana are planned to be carried out by Soyuz rockets under the OneWeb program in 2022, the head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin said in an interview with Interfax.
"Seven launches with OneWeb devices are tentatively planned for 2022, of which six are from Russian cosmodromes and one is from the Kourou cosmodrome," Rogozin said.
The first OneWeb satellites were launched into orbit in February 2019, the launch was carried out from the Guiana Space Center (French Guiana).
In July 2021, the British company announced that it plans to complete the deployment of a satellite constellation to provide global coverage by June 2022. According to OneWeb, the grouping in low Earth orbit will consist of 648 satellites.
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, 2021, the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, announced that the state corporation and OneWeb held negotiations on April 9 at Baikonur to conclude 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.
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.
