MOSCOW, May 23. /TASS/. With the accession of new states to the BRICS group the total strength of national satellite constellations of the association's member-countries has exceeded 1,200 spacecraft, Roscosmos CEO Yury Borisov has said.
"On May 23, a meeting of the heads of space agencies from the BRICS member-countries was held in Moscow under Russia’s presidency. The event was also attended by Russia’s sherpa in BRICS, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov. In his welcoming speech, Yuri Borisov, the CEO of Roscosmos, said that the accession of the new member-countries to BRICS increased the overall strength of national orbital groups to more than 1,200 satellites," the corporation said in a news release.
International system of ensuring space activities’ security
It is noted that at the plenary session on current and future projects of BRICS Borisov came up with an initiative to create an international system to ensure the safety of space activities, to be built on the basis of an open information platform for information exchanges and monitoring of the situation in near-Earth space.
"The open platform will be a kind of information hub for exchanging data on the situation in both near and deep space, including warnings of potentially dangerous space objects in order to prevent collisions," Roscosmos added, noting that access to the system would be open to any participant, regardless of competencies and technical capabilities, goals and terms of cooperation.
BRICS module of Russia’s orbital station
Roscosmos invited partners to cooperate in crewed flights. Borisov mentioned the possibility of creating, as parts of the Russian Orbital Station (ROS), both modules for individual BRICS countries and a common module of the BRICS alliance for a joint crewed space program.
"Such cooperation involves experiments for scientific and applied research and a full cycle of training BRICS cosmonauts," the state corporation stated.
Draft statement on preventing placement of weapons in space
Roscosmos said that the participants in the meeting considered a draft joint statement by the heads of BRICS space agencies calling on the world community to exert every effort to prevent the placement of weapons of any type in space and to refrain from activities fraught with risks of causing damage to the space environment and long-term sustainability of space activities, as well as from using civilian space infrastructure for undeclared purposes.