Russia intends to switch on a commercial version of its homegrown answer to Starlink next year, according to people familiar with the programme cited by Reuters, the latest milestone in a project that has been promising to arrive for most of a decade.

The constellation is called Rassvet, the operator is a private aerospace firm called Bureau 1440, and the ambition is deliberately narrower than the American network it is meant to rival.

The scale tells the story. SpaceX has put thousands of Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. Bureau 1440 plans to reach commercial service in 2027 with a constellation in the high hundreds, with figures around 288 to 292 satellites cited for the first operational phase, and a longer-term target near 900 by the mid-2030s.

Moscow has, for years, described the goal as something conceptually like Starlink rather than a like-for-like match, and the numbers keep that promise honest.

The hardware is further along than the rhetoric alone would suggest. In March the company launched 16 operational satellites, on 23 March, following a run of experimental craft in 2023 and 2024 under the Rassvet-1 and Rassvet-2 test programmes.

Bureau 1440 has described the satellites as carrying 5G non-terrestrial-network communications, laser inter-satellite links, an upgraded power system, and plasma thrusters, the standard kit for a modern broadband constellation.

Dmitry Bakanov, head of the Roscosmos space agency, told Reuters last September that several test vehicles already in orbit had been inspected and the production satellites modified accordingly.

Throughput targets have been published too. Bureau 1440 has advertised per-subscriber speeds ranging from 50 megabits to one gigabit per second, with planned coverage across more than 70 countries.

Those figures are claims rather than demonstrated performance, the distinction that separates a constellation on a slide from one carrying paying traffic, and only the commercial launch will test them.

Money has been committed, on paper at least. The Russian government has earmarked 102.8 billion roubles, roughly $1.26bn, for Rassvet, and Bureau 1440 has said it will add some 329 billion roubles, around $4bn, of its own through 2030.

The company has put potential demand at 1.5 to two million subscribers inside Russia and as many as 12 million worldwide, with coverage planned across more than 70 countries.

The 2027 date deserves a footnote. An earlier target slipped amid reported production shortfalls, which is the kind of detail that tends to recur in constellation programmes everywhere, not only in Russia.

Building satellites is one problem; building them fast enough, in the numbers a useful network requires, is a different and harder one. The 16 operational craft now in orbit are a start on a figure that needs to clear 250 before paying customers can be served.

There is a strategic reading that sits underneath the commercial one. A sovereign broadband network that does not depend on a foreign operator is attractive to any government that has watched Starlink become a factor in the war in Ukraine.

Whether Rassvet arrives on schedule, and at the throughput Bureau 1440 advertises, is the question 2027 will answer. The constellation, for now, is mostly a plan with a launch cadence attached.