Business · Ars Technica
Russia cloaks launch schedule after spaceport falls in Ukraine's sights
Compiled by KHAO Editorial — aggregated from 1 outlet. See llms.txt for citation guidance.
◌ Single Source
If you believe official Russian reports, the country’s northern spaceport has come under attack from drones on multiple occasions in the last few months.
Key facts
- This network, called Rassvet, is undergoing development by a company called Bureau 1440, which the Russian government has backed with more than $1.2 billion
- Russian officials released strange overlapping airspace and maritime warning notices for two different launches from Plesetsk sometime between April 13 and April 30, with launch windows for the two
- The official public warnings for the next Soyuz rocket launch from Plesetsk were even more ambiguous, covering various periods between April 1 and 15
- A week later, on April 23, a smaller Angara-1.2 rocket launched from the cosmodrome with a quartet of suspected military spy satellites
Summary
The drones did not succeed in striking the spaceport, but the attempted attacks come as Russia ramps up activity at Plesetsk Cosmodrome to deploy a new constellation of Internet and data relay satellites akin to SpaceX’s Starlink, a space-based network underpinning much of Ukraine’s military communications infrastructure. The Russian space agency’s first acknowledgment of an attempted drone attack at Plesetsk came a few weeks ago, when the head of Roscosmos, the Russian state corporation for civilian spaceflight, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. Dmitry Bakanov, the general director of Roscosmos, regaled Putin with a list of Russia’s recent accomplishments in the space sector. Then the general director of Roscosmos told Putin about “perhaps the most exciting event” for Russia’s space program in the last year.