A group of experts from Russian aerospace agencies has departed for the Guiana Space Center (CSG), located in French Guiana's commune of Kourou, to make preparations for the upcoming launch of the first batch of UK OneWeb communication satellites aboard Russian Soyuz carrier rocket, a source in the space industry told Sputnik
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th January, 2019) A group of experts from Russian aerospace agencies has departed for the Guiana Space Center (CSG), located in French Guiana's commune of Kourou, to make preparations for the upcoming launch of the first batch of UK OneWeb communication satellites aboard Russian Soyuz carrier rocket, a source in the space industry told Sputnik.
"Russian specialists will be working on the Russian part of the contract on the preparation and conduct of the launch of the Soyuz-ST-B space rocket with the Fregat-M upper stage and a cluster of OneWeb broadband internet satellites. The launch vehicle and the upper stage, necessary for this launch, were delivered to Kourou back in the fall of 2018; at that same time, the first part of preparations for the launch of the upper stage Fregat-M was completed as well," the source said.
According to the source, experts from Russian Space Rocket Center Progress � the manufacturer of the Soyuz carrier rocket � will arrive at the CSG early next week to prepare the spacecraft for the launch.
On Monday, another source in the space industry told Sputnik that the launch of the satellites was scheduled for February 20.
After the launch of the first satellites that will make up OneWeb's constellation, the devices will be tested to see how they behave in space before the rest of the satellites are put into orbit. A total of 12 launches of the Soyuz-ST-B carrier rockets are expected to take place from the Baikonur cosmodrome between the end of 2019 and the middle of 2020, and another five launches are set to be held at Russia's Vostochny cosmodrome late next year.
Russia's State Space Corporation Roscosmos, whose experts are among those sent to Guiana, has a contract with France's Arianespace and OneWeb to put a total of 672 communication satellites into the Earth's orbit over the course of 21 commercial Soyuz launches from the GSC and the Baikonur and Vostochny cosmodromes.
UK company OneWeb is creating a constellation of hundreds of communication satellites that will provide broadband Internet access worldwide, potentially including Russia.
