Russia&CIS

SpaceWatch.Global is a proud partner of the Secure World Foundation, and a greateful recipient of SWF support. The SWF published a new report on 11 April 2018 titled Global Counterspace Capabilities: An Open Source Assessment that provides an exhaustive, comprehensive, incisive, and useful open source guide to global counterspace capabilities and developments, as well as analysis of their implications. Here, the authors of that report, Victoria Samson and Brian Weeden, summarise the study and provide a broader geopolitical context about its importance.

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The Russian Chief of the General Staff and First Deputy Defence Minister of Russia, General Valeriy Gerasimov, gave a speech on his conception of future warfare to the Military Academy of the General Staff on 24 March 2018, in which the military uses of space features prominently.

The United Arab Emirates has signed a Letter of Intent with Russia and Kazakhstan to cooperate in space exploration and future space projects. The agreement was signed during a visit to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan by a delegation from the UAE Space Agency led by Dr. Ahmad Abdullah Al Falasi, UAE Minister of State for Higher Education and Advanced Skills and Chairman of the UAE Space Agency.

U.S. defence officials claim that Russia successfully tested its PL19 – Nudol antisatellite (ASAT) missile from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on 26 March 2018, according to the online geopolitics and current affairs magazine The Diplomat.

Kazakhstan and Russia have recently concluded one of their periodic renegotiations of the Russian lease of the Baikonur Cosmodrome located on the Kazakh steppe, and the workhorse of Russia's launch schedule, with significant implications for Kazakhstan's space ambitions, according to analysis provided by Anna Gussarova in the Eurasia Daily Monitor published by U.S. think tank, The Jamestown Foundation.

The Ukrainian national space agency, the State Space Agency of Ukraine (SSAU), is proposing to build a space launch centre in northwest Australia according to a report published in The West Australian newspaper. The SSAU is proposing that the Western Australian State and Australian Federal Government provide a commercial lease …

The proposed national space programme of Ukraine for 2018-2022, and prepared by the State Space Agency of Ukraine (SSAU), could be submitted to the government for consideration in April 2018, according to a source in the Ukrainian space and rocket industry, reports Interfax-Ukraine. “At present, the agency has completed the …

Precious Payload, the brain child of Russian entrepreneurs Andrei Rebrov and Andrey Maskimov, is aiming to transform the way in which small satellite operators secure their launches. As we heard at Satellite 2018 this year, small satellites are being hit by a launch bottleneck and are mostly reduced to piggybacking on larger satellite launches and settling for what they can get. This can impact negatively on schedules and revenues.

The recent InSpace Forum held in Moscow demonstrated progress in cooperation and dialogue between Russia's state-run space companies and its fledgling New Space sector, reports Anastasiya Svarovskaya. The InSpace Forum 2018 held in Moscow on 21 March 2018 considered ways for the business sector and the state to cooperate in the space industry. This year’s forum was the third such event, and it consisted of two sections – the commercial space industry section and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) section.