The Russian government will allocate 151 billion rubles to create a system of space satellites for navigation along the Northern Sea Route, Kommersant reports. In accordance with the plans, by 2024 two Arktika-M satellites for weather monitoring, two Kondor-FKA satellites and one Obzor-R satellite for radar survey of the water area will go into orbit.
The expansion of the satellite network is extremely important, analysts say: due to sanctions, Russian companies cannot receive Earth remote sensing (ERS) and automatic ship identification systems (AIS) images from foreign companies, and this is required by the year-round safe operation of the NSR.
The money will be allocated from the state budget until 2031, according to the published plan for the development of the Northern Sea Route, to which the publication refers. The curator of this program is the Roscosmos State Corporation.
According to the plan, four satellites of the Express-RV communication system will be launched into orbit by the end of 2026 to provide Internet access. 33.8 billion rubles are provided for their construction and sending into space. until 2024. It is planned to spend 50.39 billion rubles on the production of five highly elliptical devices Arktika-M for weather monitoring. until 2031.
For remote sensing of the NSR water area, it is planned to create and launch six all-weather radar surveillance satellites. These will be four Condor-FKA and two Obzor-R devices. Two Condor-FKAs are planned to be launched into orbit by the end of 2024, and two more by the end of 2031. The first Obzor-R should be operational by the end of 2024, the second by the end of 2030. In total, it is planned to allocate 60.15 billion rubles for the creation of these systems.
Until recently, AIS services were provided by American companies, and it is no longer possible to obtain them officially. Without radar remote sensing, it is impossible to obtain a picture of the current ice situation, and such information is also not available in the Russian Federation, since foreign data providers have broken distribution agreements with Russian companies.