Roscosmos, Rogozin and private business: together or as always?

Victoria Pavlova

Roskosmos needs private capital to "divide up areas of responsibility" and commercialize space. Timely remark: although 50% of Russians, according to Romir's polls, still consider their country a space power, in fact it is rather an illusion. Russia accounts for only 1.5% of the global space services market of 318.6 billion euros. This is the assessment of Sergey Baskov, Academician of the Tsiolkovsky Russian Academy of Cosmonautics.

More recently, everything was different: in 2017, Roscosmos planned to increase its share in the global market from 4.8% to 5.5% by 2020, by 2025 to bring it to 8.3%, and by 2030 - to reach 9.5%... But for some reason, promises to build new rockets and a lunar base do not help achieve ambitious goals. Space services are not only about launching carrier rockets. This is the construction of various satellites, and the provision of services for observing the earth's surface, and the provision of space communications services. Let's see what Roscosmos can boast of here.

We have satellites of the Electro-L series, which are monitoring the earth's surface. Anyone can download images from these satellites. But there is a nuance: these are geostationary satellites for hydrometeorological observation, which are of interest only to a narrow circle of experts. For a wide range of applied tasks, specialists from different industries, from agrarians and ecologists to power engineers and representatives of the oil and gas complex, use the services of foreign companies. For example, the consequences of the leakage of hydrocarbons into the Ob from SiburTyumenGaz in March of this year were studied using multispectral images from the Sentinel-2 satellite of the European project for monitoring the earth's surface, Copernicus. The images from the Russian satellite "Resurs-P" are closer to these tasks, but they are mainly used to verify the images of "Sentinel-2": one visible range is not enough to analyze the information.

In terms of rapidly developing space communications, we are also going our own way. SpaceX has already completed 28 rocket launches with StarLink satellites providing high-speed Internet access. There are already 1,675 such satellites in orbit, and the system is functioning: it is already beginning to be used not only in the United States, but also in Europe. From the Vostochny cosmodrome, we have made several launches of rockets with OneWeb satellites. But you need to understand that in this case, Roskosmos is only launching a rocket. The entire space Internet system is foreign. But we often hear about domestic satellites "Gonets-M". Unfortunately, this is not at all like StarLink or OneWeb. "Gonets-M" is a revised "Gonets-D", which in turn represents the conversion of the Strela-3 special communications system, which began to be developed back in 1989. For the functioning of the system, 12 satellites are enough, and by 2025 Roskosmos promises to build 5 more copies. And this system is only capable of sending text messages to either email or mobile phones. Alas, with such features, all seasons of "Game of Thrones" in high definition can not be viewed.

There are just as many questions as to who will be Roscosmos partners. Formally, cooperation with private traders already exists. For example, on September 1 last year, Roskosmos signed an agreement on the construction of a transport spacecraft with the private company Reusable Transport Space Systems, created by the ex-CEO of S7 Space, Sergey Sopov. Sounds good. Only MTKS has no work experience - the company was created in May 2019 with an authorized capital of only 400 thousand rubles. But it is located in Korolev, and its general director Dmitry Kakhno at the same time heads Energia-Logistics, owned by Roskosm's RSC Energia. All their own. Well, it just coincided...

But for other private traders, things are not going so smoothly. Dauria Aerospace developed satellites for observing the Earth, but they never started working - according to one of the versions, due to a malfunction in the Roskosm upper stage. But the state corporation did not recognize the problem and did not create a commission to identify the causes of the accident. But she filed a lawsuit for 274.1 million rubles. For Dauria, this meant only one thing - bankruptcy. Due to the impossibility of gaining access to test sites, Lin Industrial was forced to test its rocket engine in an urban industrial zone in Moscow Pechatniki. An accident in such unsuitable conditions greatly complicated the further development of the project. And more recently, in April 2021, the CosmoCourse company, which was preparing for suborbital tourist flights, was closed. But everything came up against the impossibility of obtaining permission to build a launch pad in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

So far, it turns out that if a private trader does not have close ties with top managers of Roscosmos enterprises, then there is practically no chance of successful implementation of projects. But for people close to all the doors are open. But is such cooperation necessary for successful competition in the global market?