HWNEWS
Two launches have put 32 satellites in space; at least three have likely failed, and none have climbed to their planned altitude.
Russia's Rassvet program has put 32 satellites in low-Earth orbit since March. None of them are in the orbit they were designed to live in. The bottleneck is not the rocket. The small plasma engines that have to walk each spacecraft, one by one, from drop-off altitude up to working altitude are not making it.
Rassvet, Russian for "dawn," is operated by a company called Bureau 1440 and pitched as a sovereign satellite-internet network for both military and civilian users, the kind of constellation SpaceX's Starlink has made familiar. The plan calls for roughly 300 satellites by the end of 2027 and 924 by 2035, spread across a shell around 500 miles (800 kilometers) up. After two Soyuz-2 launches from Plesetsk, one in March and one in July, Russia has 32 of those spacecraft in space, and 32 is roughly a tenth of where Bureau 1440 said it would be by next year.
The design altitude is the key number, and it is the one the program is not hitting. The 800-kilometer orbit is not a finish line for show; it is where the constellation is supposed to deliver continuous coverage across Russian territory. Each Rassvet spacecraft separates from the rocket at a lower drop-off altitude, typically a few hundred kilometers up, and is then expected to climb on its own, using an onboard plasma engine that ionizes a propellant and pushes the satellite upward in a slow, steady burn. That propulsion is what gets the satellite to operational altitude. It is also what is failing.
An assessment released this week by the Institute for the Study of War, and synthesized by Ars Technica, maps the public orbital data. Of the 16 satellites launched in March, 12 have stabilized at roughly 500 kilometers, well short of the 800-kilometer target. One March satellite never executed a significant maneuver and reentered the atmosphere in June. Two more have not raised their altitude in the last two months, and ISW treats them as likely failures.
The July batch is still in motion, and the early picture is rougher. Two of those 16 satellites have not maneuvered at all and appear to be heading for reentry. Three stopped maneuvering after initial attempts. Eleven were noticeably climbing by early August, according to independent orbital tracker Jonathan McDowell, whose height-versus-time chart for Rassvet-3 shows how slowly the spacecraft has climbed since deployment. Independent Russian space journalist Anatoly Zak at RussianSpaceWeb has tracked the same launch.
Put together, the trackers count at least three of the 32 satellites as outright failures, with several more showing signs of trouble. The two Soyuz-2 launches themselves appear to have worked. What is breaking is the slower, quieter part of the mission: the weeks-long climb to operational altitude under plasma propulsion, where a single stuck thruster or a degraded ion grid can pin a satellite below its working orbit for the rest of its life.
The same propulsion constraint now defines any sovereign LEO broadband program. The binding step in low-Earth-orbit constellations has shifted from launch cadence to in-space propulsion. SpaceX gets to operational altitude in part by deploying so many satellites that the constellation works even when some individual spacecraft fail. Bureau 1440 is trying to do the same job with a fraction of the satellites and a propulsion system that, on the public evidence, has not yet walked a single Rassvet to its planned 800 kilometers.
The open question is whether the underperforming satellites will eventually climb, and whether Bureau 1440 can fix the propulsion issue on later batches in time to keep the 2027 milestone. The program is not collapsing, and the rocket is not the problem. The gap between Russia's announced sovereign-internet ambition and what is currently on orbit is now wide enough to measure, and the rest of the constellation is on the clock.