Area of interest: General Director of RSCC Alexey Volin spoke about integration with satellite systems at NGSO within the Sfera project
Alexey Volin, General Director of RSCC spoke about the tasks that RSCC telecommunications satellites solve in geostationary orbit, and how they intersect with the mission of the federal Sfera project in the framework of the industry conference "Sfera. Telecom operator — 2024". The event was held in St. Petersburg on June 26 and was organized by JSC "SS "Gonets" with the support of Roscosmos.
According to Alexey Volin, the appearance of future satellites should be considered in cooperation so that promising constellations could meet the necessary requirements as much as possible. For example, the task of providing television broadcasting can never be complete with the help of non-geostationary systems. At the same time, some of the telecommunications spacecraft on the GEO will work out their useful lifetime in the near future and the look of the satellites that will replace them largely depends on what will happen to non-geostationary constellations.
"For example, if the issue of the Ka-band, high-speed Internet, is closed with the help of the NGSO-projects, we will not have to design a number of transponders on our new spacecraft. Then we can focus more on television. But our decision point here is 2027-2028, respectively, by this time we all need to understand which direction to move in," said General Director of RSCC.
As Alexey Volin noted, the second goal of the joint work of market participants within the framework of the federal Sfera project is to create unified receiving equipment: "International practices show that the industry is moving towards providing integrated satellite services combining the advantages of GEO, highly elliptical orbit, as well as low and medium orbits. However, it is important that consumers do not "drown" in the variety of subscriber devices for each individual solution. Therefore, it is necessary to think about unification at an early stage so that the user can receive a signal from different spacecraft in one place."
The General Director of RSCC also focused on the use of the enterprise's ground infrastructure for new projects of the Sfera. "The space communication centers of RSCC may soon be involved in the interests of new constellations provided for by this federal project. We are talking about the construction of territories in Vladimir, Zheleznogorsk, Khabarovsk and the placement of stations for "Express RV", "Gonets" and Marathon". We are ready to provide our resources for the development and testing of this equipment, because, I repeat, today user devices are one of the key points that require our active attention," concluded Alexey Volin.
General Director of RSCC has proposed to determine right now which niche the new satellite constellations are going to occupy in the market. "Today it is said that "Express-RV" will provide communications to the Northern Sea Route and "Skif" will participate in the program to eliminate digital inequality. However, now both tasks are completely solved with the help of GEO devices. And we need to understand what will motivate consumers to switch to new satellites and invest in ground infrastructure at the same time." He added that for an objective analysis of the situation on the satellite communications market, it is necessary to invite representatives of "Bureau 1440" to a dialogue.
The discussion was also attended by Alexander Bloshenko, Deputy General Director of "Roscosmos" for Space Complexes and Science, Pavel Cherenkov, General Director of JSC "SS "Gonets", Yuri Mishin, Head of Marketing and Special Projects Department of RESHETNEV JSC, Oleg Mentus, Director of Space Systems Research Center of NIIR and other players of Russian satellite market.