Moscow (AFP)
A Soyuz rocket lifted off from Russia's Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Far East on Thursday and began orbiting 36 satellites of British operator Oneweb, which is deploying a constellation to provide high-speed internet to all over the world.
“Today at 5:47 am Moscow time (02:47 GMT), a Soyuz-2.1b rocket with 36 satellites of the company Oneweb was launched,” said Russian space agency Roskosmos, adding that “the launch and separation of the upper block of the third floor took place normally ".
"We can confirm that our sixth separation is over. More than half of our satellites are now out," Oneweb later posted on Twitter.
A total of nine separations will be required to deploy the entire fleet.
Oneweb, owned by the British government with the Indian Bharti, plans an operational global internet at the end of 2022 thanks to 650 satellites in orbit.
The previous launch, of 36 devices again, took place in December 2020 from Vostotchny.
According to a contract with the European Arianespace confirmed in September 2020, 16 Soyuz launches are planned between December 2020 and the end of 2022 to complete the Oneweb network.
Several projects to set up constellations providing a global internet from space are underway.
The American billionaire Elon Musk, head of the space company SpaceX, has already put into orbit for this purpose a thousand satellites to create the Starlink network.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a similar project called Kuiper.
The launch on Thursday took place from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, whose construction in Russia has been peppered with countless corruption scandals and delays.
Located in the Far East, near the border with China, this launch base will eventually replace the Baikonur one that Moscow has rented from Kazakhstan since the fall of the USSR in 1991.
© 2021 AFP