MOSCOW, February 19 Roscosmos plans to spend about 50 billion rubles on creating a conveyor for serial production of satellites weighing up to half a ton, said the general director of the state corporation Yuri Borisov in interview with the portal «Pro Cosmos».
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"We need to create a conveyor for devices up to 500 kilograms, this is different technological equipment and requires real costs. For which we, in fact, planned about 50 billion rubles,” he said.
Borisov explained that the Reshetnev enterprise already operates a conveyor line for assembling telecommunication satellites and Earth remote sensing devices, but weighing no more one hundred kilograms. According to the head of Roscosmos, this site could become “a prototype of the transition to an industrial model.”
«The cost, labor intensity, and timing of creating satellites on this mini-conveyor have been confirmed; they are significantly lower than in the slipway production. Moreover, this experience made us think that it is possible to move on to creating more serious satellites, heavy, using conveyor assembly technologies. More precisely, you can use a combination between slipway and conveyor assembly, assembling the main panels on the conveyor, and the entire satellite is already on the slipways,» Borisov added.
In addition, he believes, a national optical center needs to be created in Russia to provide equipment for the Earth remote sensing group. According to the general director, this task is already being solved jointly with Rosatom enterprises, as well as Russian and Belarusian companies.