A ceremonial event celebrating the start of construction by Gazprom of a spacecraft assembly facility (SPKA) took place today in Shchelkovo, Moscow Region.
Taking part in the event were Vitaly Markelov, Deputy Chairman of the Gazprom Management Committee, Yury Urlichich, First Deputy Director General of the Roscosmos State Space Corporation, and Vadim Khromov, Deputy Head of the Government of the Moscow Region.
The first fully integrated enterprise in the history of modern Russia for the assembly and testing of satellites will be situated near the Telecommunications Center of Gazprom Space Systems. The facility will use cutting-edge technologies to produce civil spacecraft for the Gazprom Group and other customers, including the Roscosmos State Space Corporation. This will help, inter alia, expand the Yamal orbital satellite constellation and the SMOTR remote sensing satellites. These space systems provide for technological communication and monitoring of the Company’s production facilities. In addition, it is planned to engage the enterprise in implementing Sphere (Sfera), a forward-looking program aimed at creating a multi-satellite orbital constellation to ensure data transmission on a public-private partnership basis.
The SPKA assembly sites will be furnished with state-of-the-art and highly automated equipment. All products will undergo multistage checking procedures, with unique test benches providing simulations of space exposure and forces that occur during rocket vehicle launches.
The enterprise will have the capacity to manufacture up to 4 mid-sized and large communications and remote sensing devices or up to 100 small batch-produced devices per year. It is planned to bring the facility into operation in 2022, with Gazprom SPKA as the operator. Gazprom intends to launch 14 Company-owned satellites into orbit before 2035.
In the course of the event, Dmitry Sevastiyanov, Director General of Gazprom Space Systems, and Yury Urlichich, First Deputy Director General for the Development of the Orbital Group and Priority Projects at the Roscosmos State Space Corporation, signed an Agreement on the basic principles of participation in the SPKA project.
The document reflects the intention of the Roscosmos State Space Corporation to acquire a stake in the authorized capital of Gazprom SPKA. The stakes of the shareholders are to be specified in a special corporate agreement at a later stage.
source: https://www.gazprom.com/press/news/2019/november/article492094/?from=mail