Russia delays launch of its own “Starlink” constellation
I’m shocked, shocked! According to news reports in Russia yesterday, Roscosmos has now delayed the initial launches for its own copycat “Starlink” constellation because the production of the satellites has fallen behind schedule.
In September 2025, Roscosmos head Dmitry Bakanov promised that by the end of 2025, the first 300 satellites would begin to be deployed in orbit as part of the Rassvet project. They are supposed to become “an analogue of the Starlink system” and provide “access to the internet at any geographical point.”
According to the publication, the postponement of the launch of the first 16 devices until 2026 may be due to the fact that the required number of satellites has not yet been assembled.
The project is being run by a Bureau 1440, supposedly a private Russian commercial company that is providing two thirds of the $5.7 billion budget, with the Russian government picking up the difference. It claims it will begin launching this year and have 318 satellites in orbit by 2028.
Wanna bet? Russia has not been able to complete any space project on time in decades, and even when its projects do finally launch, each routinely has had serious technical and quality control issues.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I’m shocked, shocked! According to news reports in Russia yesterday, Roscosmos has now delayed the initial launches for its own copycat “Starlink” constellation because the production of the satellites has fallen behind schedule.
In September 2025, Roscosmos head Dmitry Bakanov promised that by the end of 2025, the first 300 satellites would begin to be deployed in orbit as part of the Rassvet project. They are supposed to become “an analogue of the Starlink system” and provide “access to the internet at any geographical point.”
According to the publication, the postponement of the launch of the first 16 devices until 2026 may be due to the fact that the required number of satellites has not yet been assembled.
The project is being run by a Bureau 1440, supposedly a private Russian commercial company that is providing two thirds of the $5.7 billion budget, with the Russian government picking up the difference. It claims it will begin launching this year and have 318 satellites in orbit by 2028.
Wanna bet? Russia has not been able to complete any space project on time in decades, and even when its projects do finally launch, each routinely has had serious technical and quality control issues.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Do you have any idea where they will be launching these satellites from?
Marshall: From one of the three Russian spaceports, Baikonur, Plesetsk, or Vostochny.
“The project is being run by a Bureau 1440 . . ”
That doesn’t Soviety, at all.
“So where do you work?” “Bureau 1440.” “Drinks are on the house.”
is big secret…Comsat double as ASAT…Moose…Squirrel
Marshall,
As it seems wildly unlikely Russia will ever be able to build these birds in the first place, their notional launch site is a moot point.
Robert Zimmerman,
The correct answer is almost certainly “None of the Above.”
The current Russian Federation is well along the path to radical contracture of borders and perhaps even to outright disappearance as a nation-state. The surpassingly ill-advised Russo-Ukraine War has radically hastened this fate.
Ukraine has been methodically de-industrializing Russia for more than two years now. That process continues and at greater and greater ranges from the nearest Ukrainian border owing to Ukrainian development and production of longer and longer-range unmanned aircraft and cruise missiles and its increasing freedom to operate covertly on the ground pretty much anywhere inside Russia.
Space industry sites have been low on the Ukrainian priority list but, should Russia not have collapsed before Ukraine has worked its way through everything higher up on said list, they will be destroyed in their turn as well.
The walls, frankly, are closing in on Russia. One of its major military goods suppliers, Iran, is in the process of having its long-ruling regime ground down to nothing and replaced by some new government that is not going to continue supplying munitions and parts to Russia. Even if the Mullahs manage to hang on for a bit longer in Iran, Ukraine has recently added the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov as a part of its own private collection of maritime shooting galleries. Come what may in Iran, munitions traffic from there to Russia is now interdicted.
The same is true of supply from North Korea and the PRC. The rail lines over which this materiel traveled have been severed in ways neither easily nor quickly repaired.
An increasing percentage of Russia’s rail net has been taken out by infrastructure attacks, especially, in recent months, on electrical generating plants and substations dedicated to use by the substantially electrified Russian rail net.
Ukraine’s attacks on oil and gas production, processing and transport infrastructure have resulted in severe shortages of motor fuel in most of Russia and a substantial fraction of its truck traffic is now immobilized in miles-long “Convoys of Death” that can’t move for lack of fuel and whose drivers cannot even remain in place owing to severe winter weather.
Then there is the recent full-court press by the Baltic NATO nations and the US against the so-called “shadow fleet” of shady tankers transporting Russian – and, until recently, Venezuelan – crude oil and refined products to what markets remain for such.
To finance the war, Putin has been, in essence, selling off Russian assets in Siberia. The PRC is, increasingly, the local sovereign many places there. PRC maps have recently been seen with Chinese names substituted for venerable Russian place names in the Far East such as Vladivostok. How much longer Vostochny will remain Russian is now a genuine question.
Russian defeat by Ukraine will also take Baikonur off the list of potential launch sites. Kazakhstan has had an increasingly testy relationship with Russia in recent years and, once the latter is no longer able to credibly threaten the former – or afford to keep paying the rent there – Russia will have only Plesetsk left, assuming it has not already been smashed by Ukraine.
One certain consequence of Russian military collapse will be the seizure of its nuclear arsenal and destruction of relevant infrastructure so as to prevent whatever may remain of Russia ever becoming a nuclear-armed pest again in future. One hopes this process will be entirely in the hands of NATO spec ops troops, but one cannot rule out the PRC taking a run at some of the strategic missile bases in the Russian Far East. Either way, Russia will be de-fanged via some rather rude “dentistry.”
Even if some rump of European Russia remains, it will have neither the money nor capability with which to build and launch a broadband mega-constellation. It will have all it can do to keep its former victim populations from paying it visits to exact bloody revenge. Further shrinkage of national territory could well result if lengthy, even though much-diminished, borders prove impossible to effectively defend.
Once this sort of crumbling starts, though, there is rarely any coming back. Russia likely faces a limited future of multiple stages of being successively eaten away by its hostile neighbors with the end-point of this process being complete national disappearance.
Dead nations launch no satellites.
Dick Eagleson: As much as your analysis has strong merit, you leave out some basics. Russia under Putin is very likely to collapse as you predict, but the people and culture of Russia will remain, in one form or another. Such things do not vanish when a government and economy fails.
And it is entirely possible that Putin and his government will not fall. Witness North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and even Venezuela and Hamas now. Despite strong pressure both inside and out, these leaders are brutal enough to take whatever action is necessary to hold power, even if it destroys the country and requires mass murder.
As for the satellite constellation, we are in general agreement. I doubt it will ever be fully deployed. However, in order to keep their Potemikin Village fantasy working, Roscosmos must launch some. I fully expect at least several dozen to reach orbit over the next five years. It will all be a sham, but it will still occur.
Russia is about out of its soviet era missiles and ammo.
They are finding (three days ago) missiles used on Ukraine that were manufactured in December 2025.
They used to find very old missiles from the 50’s being used in the war.
Heck they even found 155mm shell detonators with NAZI markings on them at the beginning of the war.
Solders are complaining about not having any small arms ammo, food or replacements.
They cant even manufacture replacement parts for its own pipelines and the electrical grid.
Putin cannot leave the Earth’s surface fast enough.
Russian space the least mourned of his victims:
https://graphicsnickstevens.substack.com/
I had been numbed to Putin’s excesses…he actually handed Islam in a more direct fashion than Westerners have the stomach for.
I guess this makes me a monster myself, but the loss that struck me the most was what was done to the AN-225.
The other atrocity I will never forget was seeing a tank blow apart an elderly couple’s car.
Robert Zimmerman,
The demographics of the ethnic Russian fraction of the Russian Federation’s population – probably about 75% of the total – is in rapid and terminal decline. Birthrates there, which had been at sub-replacement levels even before the Soviet collapse – dropped by further major multiples after that event. Of the mingy number of post-Soviet children born in Russia, Putin has already fed over a million of the males into the Ukrainian meatgrinder and another million or two have fled to avoid the same fate. Fertility rates continue to fall as the modest population of women of child-bearing age left to Russia are deprived of potential mates by the charnel house that is the Russo-Ukraine War. The Russian population, in short, is in a death spiral from which it is not going to return even absent any violence against it by formerly oppressed non-Russian populations from either extant or near-future break-away states. I have, in the past, described Russia as a hospice nation. I see no reason to revise that opinion.
Nations can, and do, disappear. The former East Germany, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are no more, to cite three recent examples. Further back in history there are numerous nations that were significant in ancient times, but have long since vanished, many of them to exactly the same sorts of causes now ripping at Russia. Where is Thrace or Phrygia or Carthage? The same place Russia will shortly be going.
Once a nation-state implodes, the population – those not killed in the events that precipitate the collapse – tend to scatter to less fraught locales. There, they marry locals, have children who will not grow up speaking the ancestral language nor think of themselves as part of – fill in the name of the dead nation of your choice. In a generation or so, the population, the culture and the language of the former nation succumb to entropy and are no more.
Your list of alleged counter-examples is not persuasive. Venezuela, Iran and Cuba will survive as nations, but their current regimes will not. Hamas has been making a pretense of being a national government in Gaza, but is entirely the creature of Iran. Absent remittances from the Mullahs, it has no basis for existence and Israel will complete its extinction.
North Korea will not long survive the fall of the PRC – which, when it goes, seems most likely to fragment into multiple new states and statelets as it has so often before in its long history. But the Han Chinese have the same, or worse, terminal demographics as Russia. So, in these two cases in particular, even the populations will not survive the collapsed former nation-states by more than a generation or two even if they escape slaughter by vengeful neighbors.
North Korea, as with East Germany, will be a reclamation project for its South Korean cousins as part of a re-unified geography and polity – assuming a combined Korea can somehow escape its own increasingly probable demographic doom. The Koreans are busily drag-racing the Han Chinese, the Japanese and the Italians toward end-state population decline.
The balance of this century is not going to be a happy time for many current nation-states. The US, fortunately, is shaping up to be the biggest winner over that same interval. We started the second Trump administration with six consequential nation-state enemies: the PRC, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba in that order of importance. Venezuela has already exited that list. By the end of this year, both Iran and Cuba seem quite likely to follow suit. It is even possible Russia will join them. That might well leave only North Korea and the PRC as consequential enemies by this time next year and the PRC is looking increasingly wobbly.
I’m not a young man, but even I may well live long enough to see the US without any remaining consequential enemies. Wouldn’t that be something.
Dick Eagleson: We will have to agree to disagree. For example, your example of the vanished nations of East Germany, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia actually proves my point. Those specific governments have vanished, but the people and cultures remain. The first has simply been absorbed back into Germany, its basic German culture continuing. Yugoslavia has simply broken up into the various cultural and ethnic factions that always existed and hated each other. And Czechoslovakia simply did the same, splitting into the already separate cultures of Czechia and Slovakia.
And while Russia is certainly going to shrink, as you rightly point out, I don’t see that culture, language, and people disappearing. They have vast territory. As a nation it might very well break up further, but the elements that exist within its territory will still continue. The governments will simply change, and adopt new foreign policies dictated by their new reality.
By the way, I wasn’t claiming than nations never vanish. Of course they do. A major change in the established population and culture of a region however takes much longer, sometimes centuries. Your prediction for Russia (the existing nation) is quite reasonable, but the underlying foundation will take far longer to be reshaped.
“Time Zones”
Negativland (2012)
https://youtu.be/QDmWYVdN8ug
(5:26)
“Do you know how many time zones are in the Soviet Union?”
As for Russia I am starting to think they will break into two or three nation states. West, Central and far East. I am not going to guess exact boarders but just spheres of influence.
China for the far east.
Kazakhstan/Turkey for the central.
Russia for the west.
But thats only if China actively tries to economically influence the far east.
China is in an economic collapse. A total collapse. I can see the nation surviving only because of the acceptance of the people. If the unregulated internet gets in I can see revolution.
”Venezuela has already exited that list.”
Unfortunately, no it hasn’t. Trump grabbed Maduro but left his regime firmly in place. His hand-picked number two has taken over just as Maduro took over from Chavez. Trump refused to take out the regime and let the popularly elected Gonzalez take over because he talked to Gonzalez and just doesn’t like him. So instead, TACO.
”By the end of this year…Iran…seem[s] quite likely to follow suit.”
Unfortunately, this is unlikely as well. Trump said on Jan 2nd that we were “locked and loaded” ready to intervene if the regime started killing protesters. A few days later he told the protesters to take to the streets and that “Help is on the way.”
It wasn’t. They took to the streets and got slaughtered by the regime. At least 36,500 protesters were killed on January 8th and 9th alone. At least another 20,000 have been arrested and sentenced to death. Protesters are being held in warehouses and killed in large batches. There are supposedly pictures of body bags stacked up like cordwood.
The protesters were calling for the crown prince Reza Pahlavi to take over, but Trump talked to him and just doesn’t like him. After meeting with Tucker Carlson at the White House on January 9th, who advised the president against “starting World War III” by attacking Iran, Trump called off the airstrikes on Iran scheduled to start January 14th, sealing the protesters’ fate. TACO again.
The protesters are now hiding in their homes waiting for the knock on the door. They dare not even go to the hospital, as the IRGC waits there to “finish the job” on injured protesters.
The protests have failed, the opposition is in disarray, and the regime is stronger than ever. These protests seem to have gone down much the same as the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, which resulted in mass death and left *that* regime stronger than ever.
Right now I’m not convinced *America* will outlast any of these evil regimes. I wish it were otherwise.
Robert Zimmerman,
I guess we will have to disagree.
You say Russia has “vast territory.” Today it does. But the old Soviet Union had appreciably more and a lot of that disappeared very quickly. Russia simply has no ability to defend its current borders against a concerted push by pretty much any of its non-Ukrainian neighbors. Come to that, it has even proven unable to keep the Ukies from waltzing into Mother Russia on diversionary feints pretty much at will.
When the Ukrainians have bled Russia sufficiently, the least-well-attached parts of the Federation will begin to go their own ways and some of Russia’s neighbors will very likely try ripping additional chunks out of the diminishing Russian national corpus – while exterminating any Russians then-currently in residence.
The language and the culture will vanish with the people who contain them. As with the Han in the PRC, Russian fertility rates have dropped so low that three to four Russians die for every delivered newborn. Even if Russians escape being quickly rendered extinct by vengeful former victim populations, just the application of the compound interest formula to Russia’s longstanding negative population growth makes it plain that the Russian ethnicity will be gone well before the end of the current century. The current regime, of course, will be gone long before that – perhaps even by later this year.
The current Russian land will remain, of course, but fewer and fewer Russians will be living on less and less of it until the Russians disappear and the change of tenancy is complete. I have no firm idea of exactly what the ethnic roots will be of the various peoples who will occupy currently Russian territory in the 22nd century, but they will not be Russians and they will not be Han Chinese.
mkent,
There is no “regime” in Venezuela. There are merely former Maduro courtiers now cautiously maneuvering for advantage. The “regime” was Maduro – now in federal lockup – and his imported Cuban bully-boys – all, or nearly all, killed by Delta Force during the Maduro snatch-op. The left-over courtiers will do what the Trump administration tells them to do on pain of lather-rinse-repeat.
You do a decent job of retelling the story the Iranian regime is trying to peddle, that all is now well in the Islamic Republic and there is nothing to see here, move along. Cell phone footage coming out of Iran tells a rather different story. The regime seems to have “control” of only parts of three major cities. There are still plenty of people out in plenty of streets and the imported bully-boy militias – and their motorcycles – are being hard-used. Government infrastructure is being set alight everywhere. Jails and prisons are being stormed and prisoners released.
Trump has an excellent opportunity, here, to put Iran in the US’s pocket once more for only a quite modest expenditure of stand-off weaponry. I hope he takes it. Splattering what’s left of the Mullah’s regime – and, one hopes, the Mullahs themselves – would allow the Iranians to quickly mop up at minimal cost and get on with the task of restoring civilized modernity to Persia.
Chechnya is about to loose its famed leader that is in the pockets of Russia.
With his death Chechnya has a very good chance of leaving the Russian sphere.
Large sections of Siberia are raising their own militias. And they are helping Ukraine.
Several other ethnic groups are raising secret militias.
If China just sends in 100,000 solders and equipment they could easily own the whole Pacific coast.
If Putin dies Russia could fall into even smaller pieces. 25 was the first year Russia did not raise as many troops as it lost in the war.
Its now loosing more troops a month than it lost in all 20 years of its Afghanistan war.
pzatchok,
All good points except about the length of the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan. The Soviets were only there 10 years. We were the ones there for 20.
The elder Kadyrov does seem to be on his deathbed. Kadyrov Jr. might be able to “inherit the family store” and keep it running, but he would have to exit Ukraine with his troops and bring them back to Chechnya in order to do so – which would be one more reverse among many coming up for the Russians.
There are separatist movements many places in Russia now, some recent and some of long-standing. The Ukrainians are being as helpful as they can to all of them for obvious reasons.
2025 was, indeed, a horrendous year for Russian troop losses. 2026 is shaping up to be worse. Russia lost roughly 400,000 troops in 2025. That is also the number of new troops it hopes to raise in 2026. I suspect it will fall short. If Ukraine fails to kill as many Russians in 2026 as it did in 2025, it will only be because Russia simply has fewer troops for them to kill.
With Iran likely soon ceasing to be of any net benefit to Russia, the Caspian now a Ukrainian shooting gallery, the “Shadow Fleet” being aggressively picked apart by a growing number of countries in widely scattered regions and Ukraine continuing to step up both the tempo and coverage of its remote-control de-industrialization/de-infrastructuralization of Russia, this might just be the year Russia falls and fails to be able to get back up – and with no Life-Alert button available to push.
While it is true the PRC might be inclined to pick up some pieces of a shattered – or even just a sufficiently weakened – Russia, it has to remain a going concern in its own right in order to do that. Recent events suggest the PRC may be quickly approaching the brittle fracture it has been courting for some years now.
Xi appears to have gone “full Stalin” on the PRC military. With PLA combat experience limited to only a few senior types – now purged – who were ordinary line troops during the disastrous Vietnam incursion of 1979 and a handful of younger types – fates unknown – who have been involved in the equally unsuccessful dust-ups with India of recent years, the PLA is not really in an ideal condition to be undertaking any attempts at making additions to national territory. That will be even more the case if “professional” – even if inexperienced – military men are replaced by types more adept at the licking of boots than of marching in them into combat.
This will also render any notional attempt to take Taiwan by force less likely to succeed – not that it was ever a likely success anyway.
The X-factor in all of this is, of course, the man whose name starts with that letter. Whatever the condition of his military, post-purge, we don’t really have any very good read on how likely Xi is to actually order any sort of military adventure should he succeed in making it through the current domestic turbulence still breathing.