Bureau 1440 launches second batch of Rassvet broadband satellites

what happened

Bureau 1440 launched 16 more Rassvet satellites on a Soyuz-2-1b from Plesetsk's Site 43 Pad 4 on July 19, per RussianSpaceWeb, confirmed by TASS. The satellites separated from the launch vehicle and established contact with the company's mission control, entering a near-polar orbit at roughly 83 degrees inclination. RussianSpaceWeb's updated tracking, citing U.S. Space Force catalog data, now reports that as of early August only nine of the 16 satellites have begun altitude-raising maneuvers, reaching 313-332 km, about 200 km lower than the first batch's satellites had reached at the same point after their own launch; the site says the rest of the second batch are either losing altitude without maneuvering or maneuvering too weakly to counteract atmospheric drag. RussianSpaceWeb's Anatoly Zak reported August 24 that three of the second batch's satellites have since abandoned their climb attempts, with orbits decaying to 310-330 km, and a pair that never maneuvered is on track for reentry; he said two more satellites are about to be lost to atmospheric drag, while the rest of the batch continues struggling to reach a stable orbit. The Institute for the Study of War reported September 1, citing satellite tracking data, that none of the second batch's 16 satellites had reached the constellation's planned 550 km operational altitude as of August 31; most remained between 300 and 400 km, well short of the intended altitude, with at least two continuing to lose altitude toward reentry, per Euromaidan Press and Newsweek. ISW assessed that only about 37.5 percent of all Rassvet satellites launched in 2026 have reached sustainable orbits, and that Russia's dependence on the limited-cadence Soyuz-2.1b rocket will keep it from fielding the hundreds of satellites Ukrainian officials say are needed for stable, round-the-clock coverage over Ukraine in the near term, per Newsweek. Independent satellite-tracking analyst Marco Langbroek published an orbital-tracking analysis on his SatTrackCam blog September 11 disputing ISW's failure framing: comparing the two batches' altitude-raising pace over their first 53 days on orbit, he found the second batch's climb is tracking closely with, and if anything marginally faster than, the first batch's own trajectory, and argued the lower operating altitude could reflect a deliberate choice rather than a fleet-wide failure to reach target altitude. RFE/RL reported September 20 that Ukraine has repeatedly struck ground infrastructure tied to the program: Russia's Dubna satellite communications center outside Moscow, the Progress Rocket and Space Center plant that builds the Soyuz rockets Bureau 1440 depends on, and in August, drones headed toward the Plesetsk cosmodrome ahead of a planned launch. RFE/RL also reported Bureau 1440 is unlikely to meet its stated target of 292 satellites at 800 km altitude by the end of 2027 under one company plan, or a separate plan for 1,350 total satellites, and said there is still no public evidence of large-scale user-terminal production ahead of Rassvet's planned 2027 commercial launch. UNN (Ukrainian News), citing the SONIKS satellite-monitoring system and RussianSpaceWeb, reported October 13 that two named second-batch satellites, No. 17 and No. 23, are losing altitude at up to 1.7 km a day from around 232-256 km, with atmospheric reentry forecast around October 29 and November 1 respectively, dates the outlet said are preliminary; it reported that of 31 production satellites still on orbit, 17 had reached about 510 km, nine were between 446 and 498 km, and five remained between 253 and 375 km. Rassvet-3 No. 17 reentered the atmosphere on October 30, roughly matching UNN's preliminary forecast, after never firing its propulsion system to raise its orbit, per Defense Express, cited by United24 Media and Fakti.bg; it is the second Rassvet-3 satellite lost after No. 4 reentered in June. Defense Express reported that No. 23 has since begun raising its altitude after dropping to about 220 kilometers around October 20, though RussianSpaceWeb's own tracking data, checked the same day, still lists a predicted decay for No. 23 around November 6.

why it matters

This is only the second operational batch for Rassvet, a domestic Russian broadband constellation pitched as a Starlink alternative; moving from a single 16-satellite batch to a second confirmed Bureau 1440 was moving into repeat production and launch cadence rather than one-off testing, a threshold non-US megaconstellation programs are increasingly clearing alongside China's Qianfan and Guowang buildouts. But the slow, partial orbit-raising in this second batch echoes the manufacturing-linked engine fault that caused one satellite from the first batch to reenter in June, raising the question of whether Bureau 1440 has a repeat production or propulsion quality problem just as it tries to scale beyond single-digit batches. ISW's September assessment that essentially the entire second batch has failed to reach operational altitude sharpens that question into a pattern rather than a one-off, and underscores how far Russia remains from the hundreds of working satellites its own officials say stable Ukraine coverage requires; independent tracking analysis disputing that specific failure framing shows the read on Rassvet's health is still contested even among people working from the same public tracking data. Reported strikes on the ground infrastructure the program depends on, its own Soyuz launch-vehicle supplier and its satellite-communications center, add a second, industrial-capacity risk to Rassvet's timeline on top of the orbit-raising problems, independent of any assessment of the conflict itself. A second confirmed satellite loss keeps the production-quality question open even as one of the two previously-doomed satellites appears to have been recovered, underscoring how uneven this batch's outcomes have been.

signal-to-noise

quick facts

Companies

Bureau 1440

Category

constellation

Impact

notable

SNR

4 / 5

Event date

2026-07-19

Published

2026-07-21 05:33 UTC