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More Glonass Satellites Soon

Russian defence minister Sergei Ivanov said last week that Russia planned to launch three new positioning satellites on 25 December for its moribund Glonass system.

The newsagency RIA Novosti says the Russians plan to increase the number of satellites in orbit to 17. They will have a seven year service life, he said.

The minister also foreshadowed the creation of a new series of spacecraft, Glonass-M and Glonass-K. They will have substantially longer on-orbit lives than current generations of spacecraft.

This reflects the changing economic reality of the Russian space industry.

In Soviet days, launches were cheap compared with equivalent western rockets. Thus it made sense to make the spacecraft cheaply. As they failed, they could be replaced.

Faced with increasingly expensive access to space, Russian engineers have now started to design their spacecraft to last.