Roscosmos will still cooperate with OneWeb

Today it became known that Roskosmos will send OneWeb and O3b communication satellites in February and March of this year. The OneWeb satellites from the Kourou space center in French Guiana will be the first to go into space, they will be launched using the Soyuz rocket. Then a manned launch of the Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft will be carried out, this will happen on March 1, as reported by Interfax.

OneWeb is a competitor of SpaceX, it plans to deploy a grouping from a large number of satellites, which will allow providing access to broadband Internet access for users all over the world. Roscosmos signed a contract to launch Soyuz missiles with OneWeb satellites in 2015. The rockets will be sent to space from the Baikonur, Vostochny and Kuru cosmodromes (17 launches will be implemented from Russian sites).

The contract integrator of enterprises from Russia in the Soyuz project in the Guiana Space Center is Glavkosmos JSC.

Thus, Roscosmos will cooperate with OneWeb despite the dissatisfaction of the FSB.

The fact that the FSB considers the OneWeb project as a threat to national security became known on October 24. Then the service representative stated that there are no guarantees “that the satellite communications system is not of intelligence nature and cannot harm the interests of the individual and society of the Russian Federation”. Also, the FSB said that the only way "to counter the threats arising from the deployment of foreign satellite communications systems to provide Internet access <...> is to limit their use in the Russian Federation."

Representatives of the FSB said that if a global Internet project is implemented, a problem will arise with the operation of SORM - the special services simply cannot control the network.