The resources of the International Space Station are almost exhausted, it is "approaching the end of its existence". And, as the head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, stated, Russia is starting to create its own station in space under these conditions.
After a meeting on the development of the rocket and space industry, which was held by President Vladimir Putin, Borisov gave an extensive interview to the Russia 24 television channel. There he shared his plans for the future and the situation in the present.
In short, cooperation with the ISS remains a priority for Roscosmos in the coming years. Although it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the unique space station in working order together with foreign colleagues.
The International Space Station is approaching the end of its existence. We extended the operation of the Russian segment by a government decision until 2028, but, unfortunately, it has already exceeded all permissible service life. 80% of the Russian equipment that operates inside the ISS is beyond the warranty period.
But at the same time, Russia is starting active work on creating a national orbital station from 2024. Support from President Vladimir Putin has already been received for this.
It is very important that this work begins in full next year. Otherwise, if we delay this issue, we will not have time to create a future station, we will have a break [in research]. All industry specialists were very worried, hoped, asked these questions to the president both at a meeting with young scientists and to cosmonauts. The President supported us, and the Russian orbital station will be!
The development of a scientific and experimental module is already underway, the first module will be launched to the ISS in two years. In eight years, by 2032, the Russian orbital station will be ready.
It will differ from the ISS not only in technical content, but also in a polar orbit, which will provide an overview of the entire Russian territory. Now, from the ISS, astronauts can see only 15% of the Russian land. But this is not enough for the development of science and technology, and for security. It is assumed that, in particular, the new station will be able to survey the strategically important Northern Sea Route 16 times a day.
Work will also be carried out to develop conveyor satellite construction. The Russian orbital satellite constellation represents only 2.5% of the global number of satellites, since Russian satellites are built for a long time and do not live long.
Now, the world is trending towards building satellites on a less expensive component base. This allows, when a number of satellites in the network fail, to replace them with new ones without losing the quality of services.
I will say frankly that we were not ready for this. Today, all satellite construction companies in the industry are theoretically capable of producing about forty satellites per year. The standard assembly of a spacecraft takes about eighteen to thirty months on the territory of the enterprise. Of course, it is simply impossible to create multi-satellite constellations at such a pace. Therefore, it is necessary to radically change the industry model for the production of these satellites, and switch to conveyor production.
However, the satellite builders themselves are more optimistic and are already saying that they are ready to put satellite production on stream.
Thus, it recently became known that the first satellite of the new Russian Marathon-IoT constellation will be sent into orbit by the end of 2023. In total, the constellation should include 264 spacecraft in a few years.
And by 2030, Russia intends to launch almost 400 domestic new communication satellites. Each of the directions – transport, Internet of Things, broadband internet access and mobile satellite service – will have its own orbits.