Moscow. February 26. INTERFAX - OneWeb has not reported a desire to abandon Russian Soyuz rockets, which are the main means of putting British satellites into orbit, said Dmitry Loskutov, head of Glavkosmos.
"There have been no statements (from OneWeb - IF), this inspires cautious optimism," Loskutov said on the Komsomolskaya Pravda radio station on Saturday.
Earlier, the introduction of sanctions against the Russian space industry was reported in the United States and the European Union. In response to European sanctions, the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, announced the termination of Soyuz rocket launches from the Kourou cosmodrome in French Guiana and the withdrawal of Russian specialists from there.
In December, Rogozin announced that in 2022, according to the OneWeb program, Soyuz rockets are planned to carry out six launches from Russian cosmodromes and one from a cosmodrome in French Guiana.
On February 7, Glavkosmos announced that the launches of 2022 under the OneWeb program will allow the British company to start providing services around the world this year.
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, Rogozin announced that Roscosmos and OneWeb held talks on April 9 at Baikonur on concluding a new contract to launch 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.
