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| Project Sledopyt: eavesdropping on foreign satellites |
| 2020-05-03 |
| [NASAspaceflight dot com] Court documents published last year suggest that the Sledopyt project has experienced significant delays over the last decade and may still be a long way from becoming operational. https://kad.arbitr.ru/Card/b08ea492-82f5-48be-b41e-ef31801de6b3 https://kad.arbitr.ru/Card/639d0527-97ad-476c-802d-2834ebb4725d The documents reveal that the project got underway on 24 July 2009 with a contract signed between the Ministry of Defense and the Radio Research and Development Institute (NIIR), the prime contractor. This was for what was officially described as “the creation of a network of specialized complexes to monitor radio emitting spacecraft” / “OKR (experimental design work) Sledopyt”, also referred to as 14Ts032 (14Ц032). One follow-up contract was signed on May 1, 2010 between NIIR and a university called the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (NIU MEI) for the IPK-S system, which is intended to intercept medium-frequency signals from satellites. Another online source makes it possible to trace that specific work to a small design bureau within NIU MEI called NPTS KB RPS (headed by Yuri Bugayev). It is also known to build radar calibration satellites called KYuA (three of which have probably been launched as Kosmos-2512, 2537 and 2538). https://mpei.ru/AboutUniverse/OficialInfo/orders2015/MPEI-15-179.pdf The July 2009 contract stipulated that the Ministry of Defense should complete “preparatory work” at the construction sites in 2012-2013, but this work ran into delays and was subsequently affected by the Western sanctions imposed on Russia beginning in 2014, which made it necessary to import certain hardware from other countries. Apparently, the preparatory work was still not completed by 2016 and on October 29, 2016 the Deputy Minister of Defense signed an order “to stop work on the OKR” on November 1, 2016 and conclude a new government contract with NIIR after completion of the preparatory work. It then took another two years (until November 6, 2018) for the Ministry of Defense and NIIR to reach an agreement on annulling the original July 2009 government contract. That decision officially went into effect on November 27, 2018. Does this mean Sledopyt has been canceled or suspended? Most likely not. The October 2016 decision of the Ministry of Defense probably ordered NIIR to temporarily halt only the work that falls directly under its responsibility, namely the design and production of hardware needed to pick up satellite signals. Presumably, the Ministry of Defense has since signed a new contract with NIIR (replacing the one of 2009) that set new timelines for the company to finish its part of the work. The actual construction work on the sites is done under separate government contracts between the Ministry of Defense and various military construction companies. The most recent one is known to have been signed on April 6, 2018. Building contracts signed with various subcontractors in 2019 for the 1511/1 site in Noginsk-9 clearly show that the project is still alive. Also, in a recent interview with the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, the head of Russia’s Main Space Surveillance Center Sergei Suchkov mentioned the development of a system to pick radio signals from satellites (most likely Sledopyt) as one of the goals to be accomplished as part of a program to modernize Russia’s space surveillance network before 2025. http://redstar.ru/nablyudat-za-zvyozdami-i-garantirovat-bezopasnost-strany/?attempt=1 Nevertheless, imagery of the sites available on Google Earth shows little progress in the construction work. As mentioned earlier here, construction of the 1511/3 site in Sukhodol does not even seem to have started, which may be partly due to an archeological discovery made on the planned construction site several years ago (see the previous posting). In short, all signs are that more than ten years after it began, the Sledopyt project is still some years away from entering service. |
| Posted by:3dc |