Russia&CIS

Belarus and Russia have signed an agreement to jointly build a constellation of eight high-resolution Earth observation satellites, according to Belarusian and Russian news media sources.

Responding to President Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order on Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources, Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the personal press secretary of Russian President Vladimir Putin, told the TASS news agency that any attempt at “privatizing” space would be considered “unacceptable.”

Three Proton-M launch vehicles have been returned from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to their manufacturer in Moscow after newly introduced Roscosmos quality control measures found defective components and parts in them.

The president of Armenia, Armen Sarkissian, signed into law a package of space activity legislation on 26 March 2020 that amend existing laws and regulations to expand state and commercial space activity in Armenia.

OneWeb, the global communications company with a mission to bring connectivity to everyone everywhere, confirmed its next launch will take place on Saturday, 21 March 2020 at 17:06 GMT from the historic Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Roscosmos Space Corporation announced on 12 March 2020 that they have decided to postpone the launch of the second ExoMars mission to study the Red Planet to 2022.

British-headquartered satellite communications company OneWeb has received permission to operate in the South Caucasus country of Armenia, according to the company’s CEO Adrián Steckel in a 1 March 2020 interview with Russian newspaper Vedomosti.

Russia’s Khrunichev Space Center has built a Proton-M carrier rocket to deliver the Nauka (Science) multi-functional laboratory module to the International Space Station (ISS), the head of the state space corporation Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, said on 21 February 2020.

A Russian military communications satellite rode a Soyuz rocket and Fregat upper stage on 20 February 2020 into an orbit stretching nearly 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) above Earth, successfully launching after a one-month delay to replace a suspect third stage on the Soyuz booster.

The Russian government has accused the United States of using an allegation that two Russian satellites are stalking a US reconnaissance satellite as an excuse to “fuel an arms race in space,” according to Sputnik, a Russian media outlet.