With more than 6 million active users, SpaceX’s Starlink has become the world’s leading provider of high-speed satellite internet. That prominence has sparked some rivalry, and not least with other world powers—including Russia.
In a televised interview on Wednesday, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency said it is pushing full steam ahead on an alternative to Starlink, Reuters reported. Dmitry Bakanov said that Roscosmos has partnered with Bureau 1440, a Russian aerospace company, to develop a low-Earth orbit satellite system for global broadband data delivery.
“Several test vehicles in orbit have already been inspected and the production ones have been modified accordingly,” Bakanov said. “We are also moving at a rapid pace in this direction.”
Can Roscosmos catch up to SpaceX?
Starlink operates the world’s largest satellite constellation: As of August 1, there were 8,075 operational Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit, according to Harvard University astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who tracks the megaconstellation on his website. That is more than half of all the satellites believed to be in orbit around our planet.
SpaceX’s network provides high-speed broadband internet to a variety of consumers, including businesses and governments—perhaps most notably, to Ukraine. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv has received more than 50,000 Starlink terminals to help it maintain military communications and drone operations, according to one Ukrainian official speaking in April of this year.
SpaceX has built its constellation over the course of six years, launching its Falcon 9 rockets hundreds of times over that period. As such, Elon Musk’s company has a solid head start over Bureau 1440, which launched its first experimental Rassvet-1 satellites in 2023, according to Space Voyaging. These satellites are part of Project “Dawn,” the company’s challenger to Starlink.
Bureau 1440 developed its satellites over the course of three years and, according to Bakanov, the company has cleared some key validation hurdles.
When will Project Dawn launch?
Its first batch of satellites is scheduled to launch at the end of 2025, he said, according to Izvestia, a Russian daily newspaper. Still, with thousands of Starlinks already in orbit and more launching every week, Project Dawn would need to scale at an unprecedented rate to catch up.
Russia’s motivation for challenging SpaceX’s dominance in low-Earth orbit is likely strategic. Having its own high-speed satellite internet constellation would strengthen its military communications and drone operations. Bakanov suggested that Project Dawn will allow Russia to control drones with greater accuracy, according to Izvestia.
But again, as Starlink showed, building a satellite megaconstellation doesn’t happen overnight, and Bureau 1440 still has a long way to go. What is clear, however, is that Russia is committed to enhancing its satellite communications capabilities.
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