Translated material
Bit map
The GLONASS system does not meet the requirements of Sergei Ivanov
Pessimism, unusual for current officials, was demonstrated yesterday at a meeting of the board of the Federal Space Agency by First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov. The government curator of the GLONASS navigation satellite system , who advertised to the president, his cabinet colleagues and the Russians its advantages and its advantageous difference from the American analogue GPS (General Position System), unexpectedly attacked Roscosmos and space industry enterprises with rather harsh criticism. The deputy prime minister’s main complaints collectively indicate the inconsistency of the Russian navigation system, which Roscosmos leaders promised to put into operation at the beginning of the year.According to the head of the space department, Anatoly Perminov, in December 2007, 1,200 satellite signal receivers were sold out in just a few days, and one of the devices was even presented as a Christmas gift to Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Rus'. However, Mr. Ivanov apparently believes that such a presentation is premature. “I draw the attention of the management of Roscosmos to the inadmissibility of failure to fulfill the assigned tasks, since GLONASS is one of the highest priority projects. We are talking about the personal responsibility of managers for the development of both individual components of GLONASS and the system as a whole,” warned the First Deputy Prime Minister.
According to Sergei Ivanov, the main problem of the GLONASS system is its unwillingness to fully provide all the services that the authorities and potential consumers expect from it. “The composition of the orbital constellation does not ensure 100% availability of services in the country, and the accuracy characteristics do not meet modern requirements,” he said. The production side of the issue also leaves much to be desired: the First Deputy Prime Minister believes that the reliability of spacecraft involved in the navigation system is far from ideal, and this is one of the reasons that “a competitive domestic navigation system has never appeared on our market.” equipment". Mr. Ivanov admitted that when drawing up the federal target program “Global Navigation System,” which he himself largely supervised, “obvious omissions” were made, which led to the fact that “today we will be forced to make changes to the program in in order to unconditionally bring the characteristics of the GLONASS system to a competitive level.”
As a curator of GLONASS, Mr. Ivanov had previously periodically mentioned the problems of the navigation system being created. But until yesterday, the tone of his statements was extremely optimistic. For example, in January 2006, at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, then simply Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Sergei Ivanov, reported to the commander-in-chief that “a number of measures have been proposed to ensure that the system on a national scale, using all ground-based receiving equipment, begins to function in end of 2007." Moreover, Mr. Ivanov specifically clarified that he means the full operation of the system, “already using all ground-based receiving equipment.” In addition, he promised the head of state to accelerate the development of GLONASS and make the navigation system truly global, covering the territory of not only Russia, but also the planet, by 2009, three years earlier than the original schedule. Last May, Mr. Ivanov did not abandon these plans, declaring before a meeting of the State Council for the Development of Cosmonautics that he believed in the potential of the Russian space and electronics industry, which “will be able, albeit not immediately,” to create an individual receiver for GLONASS and thus most compete with GPS analogues .
Perhaps Sergei Ivanov sincerely declared the possibility of achieving competitiveness with GPS, which has long conquered the market for navigation services, although even the estimated cost of a Russian system receiver ($400-500) is several times higher than the sales prices of foreign navigators, not to mention the significant difference in sizes. In any case, he set specific deadlines for the commissioning of GLONASS and justified funding for the implementation of the project. Judging by the fact that none of the enterprises involved in the program refused the money, everyone agreed with the conditions of the Deputy Prime Minister. They really had to work in a short time (Vladimir Putin also demanded to speed up the commissioning of the navigation system), but complaints about time pressure do not look very convincing, because the current project, in fact, is a resuscitation of the program for creating a domestic global navigation system developed at the Research and Production Association of Applied Mechanics named after. Reshetnev back in the 80s.
The system was positioned as the Soviet answer to GPS and was designed for both military and civilian users of navigation services. But the reserve left over from Soviet times was only enough for the military, and even then not for long. By December 1995, the constellation of satellites involved in this program numbered 24 units, but as their service life expired, more and more satellites were sent into retirement. Until recently, the replacement of failed ones with new ones was carried out rather slowly, and therefore now there are only 16 satellites in orbit with navigation functions. Moreover, the last three were launched into orbit literally in December last year.
However, even taking this into account, Sergei Ivanov would not be able to report to the president that the system is fully operational and covers the territory of the entire country. As Roscosmos press secretary Alexander Vorobyov told Vremya Novostey, “by February 10, with the commissioning of three GLONASS-M satellites launched into orbit on December 25, the navigation signal coverage of the territory of Russia will be 95%, and the territory of the world -- 83%." But Roscosmos claims that six more navigation satellites will be launched into orbit by the end of the year.
The First Deputy Prime Minister was not satisfied with this result. The failure to fulfill the tasks assigned to GLONASS is due, according to him, also to the lack of a regulatory framework, because there are still no official documents regulating “the use of digital navigation maps and navigation activities in the Russian Federation.” Over the past year, Roscosmos and the main consumer of the system, the Ministry of Defense, have not agreed on the tactical and technical requirements for the system as a whole and specifically for the GLONASS-K spacecraft, which is expected to operate in orbit for ten years. As a result, Mr. Ivanov not only warned space industry leaders about personal responsibility, but also made it clear that other promising projects of the department, including very expensive ambitious interplanetary flight programs, would be carefully considered by the government for their economic feasibility. He stated that our country will not “develop near-Earth space only to satisfy its own ambitions.” Russian spacecraft will fly, for example, to Mars only if it promises “concrete economic benefits” and also helps “in solving serious scientific problems.” The First Deputy Prime Minister called for “speeding up the process of creating high-tech products and developing commercial proposals using space technologies” so as “not to first make money from being taken into orbit, and then pay for services.”
The head of Roscosmos, Anatoly Perminov, preferred not to enter into disputes with the First Deputy Prime Minister and hastened to agree with the criticism. Later, he stated that he was also dissatisfied with the work of the managers of several key enterprises in the industry (including the parent organization for the GLONASS program - the Russian Research Institute of Space Instrumentation), but warned that they have time to improve until April. The RNII KP itself refused to explain what exactly these claims are, and Roscosmos only clarified that they are “purely production in nature.”
The reluctance to wash dirty linen in public is most likely explained by the fact that Roscosmos intends to ask the state for additional funding for the GLONASS program. A convenient occasion to do this will be at one of the upcoming meetings of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, where the “Fundamentals of the Russian Federation’s policy in the field of space activities for the long term” (tentatively until 2020) will be considered. The amount of the expected request has not yet been announced, but promises are already being made to produce 500 thousand portable (by the standards of our space industry) devices capable of working with GLONASS navigation satellites within a few months.