Sprouts of their own satellite Internet appeared in Russia

A small group of scientists demonstrated the operation of an analogue of the Starlink satellite faster than Roscosmos

Russia conducted the first Internet traffic via a space satellite! In fact, the beginning of the country’s first low-orbit global Internet was laid, hello to Elon Musk. Moreover, the successful result was obtained not by a state-owned company, but by a private one, the existence of which until recently was not known to many.

We are talking about a small (about 40 people) group of young scientists who developed, created and launched at the end of June from the Vostochny cosmodrome three test satellites Rassvet-1.

Everyone probably knows, and some may have seen a flying “train” in the night sky from many hundreds of satellites of the Starlink group, which was created by Elon Musk. Europeans have similar ones – OneWeb, and the Chinese – GalaxySpace. All of them provide their users with fast and pervasive Internet even where it is not possible in principle to conduct it, for example, in some high-mountainous settlement.

But there were connected satellites before, you say. They still exist, but their minus is that they are geostationary, that is, they are in a high orbit (36 thousand km) and “fixed” over a certain region, providing communication, for example, one or two oil companies or a military unit. But life, as practice has shown, requires greater mobility for satellite communication systems. For example, to successfully provide it to the military on the battlefield.

Analysts from the first days of the SVO have recognized that Starlink satellite communications have been a key tool for Ukrainian command and control over the actions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. They complained that we don’t have anything like this, they recalled the Sfera group that had not yet developed, which Dmitry Rogozin spoke about when he was the head of Roskosmos. Interestingly, on October 23 last year, the first satellite under the Sphere program, Skif-D, was nevertheless launched into orbit to test technical solutions and a mechanism for protecting the orbital-frequency resource of the future constellation. But ours have been swinging for a very long time – the launch of the second, third “Scythians” has not yet been heard.

Against this background, the transmission of the Internet via satellite to a single private company is something akin to a sensation, although some consider it just a successful “student job”.

– Competence in this matter is still important, – says Konstantin Kreydenko, editor-in-chief of the Vestnik-GLONASS magazine. “Moreover, we see a session of Internet traffic transmission successfully carried out in test mode, a test of the operation of ground equipment. As far as I understand, their plan is to create a group. If you look at similar ones, for example, Starlink Mask, she also had the same test launch at first. Now the Rassvety is undergoing flight tests: checking the on-board systems of the vehicles, communication channels, checking the systems of the ground control complex.

Help “MK”. The Internet satellite is a repeater from which the signal of the Internet provider sent from the Earth is reflected. For greater communication reliability and greater coverage of the territory, the provider launches many satellites.

The developers of the test satellites said that while the first test devices transmit the Internet to Earth at a speed of 10 Mbps, and in the future they promise that they will increase it to 100 Mb / s (for reference, for Musk satellites it is 104.6 Mb / s).

The next stage for developers is serial and mass production of domestic devices to provide satellite broadband Internet access at high speed and with minimal delays to all residents of Russia and a number of foreign countries. It is assumed that such an Internet will start working as early as 2027, when about 200 satellites will be in orbit. By 2035, it is planned to launch more than 900 vehicles into orbit.

In the meantime, the creators of the satellite rejoice at the first result, jumping like children, with tears in their eyes. “I’m not crying. This is the Internet in the eye! says one of them in a video showing a successful test with Internet traffic.