Moscow says the Rassvet spacecraft dropping out of orbit were always meant to come down, and now count as munitions.
Russia has reclassified its sinking Rassvet satellites as guided munitions, with orbital decay listed as the guidance system. Officials call the falling spacecraft a strike package; analysts call it paperwork. A follow-on design will make the launch vehicle itself the weapon.
“— which is why the word ‘failure’ was never appropriate,” said Arkady Solomin, speaking for the Rassvet programme office. “The hardware is arriving. It is arriving at speed. That is a capability.”
Russia has formally reclassified its troubled Rassvet satellite constellation as a class of guided munition. The spacecraft, built as a homegrown answer to Starlink, have been sinking steadily towards the atmosphere. Solomin says this was the design.
The programme launched with the usual promises of sovereign internet for every corner of the federation. One satellite has already gone. Two more are expected to burn up, which the office now describes as the terminal phase of a strike package.
Under the new paperwork, orbital decay is the guidance system. Gravity is listed as a subcontractor.
Solomin confirmed the office cannot say where any given satellite will come down, and framed this as an advantage. “The enemy also cannot say,” he said. “Surprise is a force multiplier.”
Officials have also stopped calling the remaining six units satellites. They are now “descending assets”, a phrase that appears throughout a six-page addendum to the original contract.
“They have taken a communications failure and given it a warhead. Not a real one. A conceptual one.”
Dr Helena Vosburgh, who tracks orbital debris at the Braemar Institute, read the addendum twice on Sunday. “They have taken a communications failure and given it a warhead,” she said. “Not a real one. A conceptual one. Paperwork does not generate lift.”
A tested formula
The manoeuvre has a long and unhappy pedigree. Storms that wrecked the Armada were later written up as seamanship. The Maginot Line was declared a triumph of engineering right up to the moment somebody walked around it.
What makes this instalment tiring is not the ambition but the reheating. We have all sat through the version where the thing that broke is announced as the thing that was intended. 1915 did it with beaches. This one does it with a solar array.
Vosburgh notes the constellation cannot maintain altitude, cannot be steered, and cannot reach anything a rocket could not reach more cheaply. Solomin says such comparisons miss the point. “A rocket is expensive,” he said. “A satellite that is already coming down is free.”
Independent reporting suggests the wider programme has deeper problems than a few doomed units, including the small matter of building the rest of them.
Solomin was unbothered. The office, he said, has begun drafting a follow-on system in which the launch vehicle itself is the weapon and the payload is optional.
That one, at least, has the decency to be honest. Everything about it is going to be reclassified in about a year.
