Russian program to create a global satellite Internet network may lose a single investor
In May of this year on Habré was published the news about the domestic project of creating a global satellite Internet network. The authors of the project believe that the global satellite network will provide a continuous communication channel for unmanned vehicles, the Internet of things and secure data transmission.
The name of the project is “Sphere”, and its approximate cost is 300 billion rubles, as previously reported by the Deputy Director General for Strategic Development and Innovations of the RKS company Yevgeny Nesterov. This is one of the most ambitious projects of the national program "Digital Economy". Recently it became known that the only major investor in the program, Vnesheconombank (VEB), decided to refuse to participate in the design and financing of GMISS.
According to the initial plans, part of the funding for the project should be allocated from the budget, and some - provided by commercial organizations. But since the project is very expensive and difficult to implement, then at the moment there are practically no business representatives among those who want to participate in it.
As for the VEB bank, it declared its intention to refuse to participate in the project quite officially - with the help of a letter drawn up by the bank's board member Alexei Ivanchenko. The author proposes to exclude VEB as a co-performer of events that are related to the financing and design of GISIS. At the same time, the bank declares its readiness to take part in events of the national program, which are associated with the development of digital start-ups, as reported by Kommersant.
At the same time, representatives of Roskosmos state that they have not yet received notifications about the withdrawal of VEB from the project, therefore the state corporation continues to work on financing options for Sphere. One option is private investment.
VEB’s withdrawal from the project was discussed on September 5 at a meeting of the working group under the presidium of the Presidential Council for Strategic Development and National Projects. The passport of the national program, as already reported, was approved by the council at a meeting on September 17. Then it was decided that the details of financing the project should be determined by 2020. Roskosmos, RCS and responsible development institutions were appointed as responsible.
Not only the implementation of the project, but even its design causes difficulties - the design period has already been postponed from 2021 to 2022. It was originally planned that a consortium with the participation of VEB, Roscosmos and other organizations would work on creating a satellite network. In addition, Rostelecom showed interest. In May, the president of the company announced that he was actively discussing a project with Roscosmos to provide the Internet with hard-to-reach and remote areas.
The recoupment of the project may take more than ten years, so its investment attractiveness is not too high. As for the Russian space industry, so far this project has not been officially presented to it, the configuration of the project is still not very clear. And for its realization it is necessary to attract “colossal investments”, which are not very easy to obtain due to the fact that the market itself is not so big. In the Russian Federation, the satellite communications market amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars, and the cost of the project is several billion.
“For the Russian market, this kind of grouping will be absolutely commercially ineffective. The only task of the project is to come up with a new way of financing the space industry, ”said the CEO of Momentus startup Mikhail Kokorich.