The relevant government and corporate regulations were signed last week, according to RBC.
The publication explains that Roscosmos will plan satellite imagery acquisition using spacecraft funded by the federal budget and approve the space imagery acquisition plan for the coming year. As specified in the government decree, planning will take into account the classification level of the data, and the plan for the following year must be drawn up no later than December 1 of the current year.
A separate Roscosmos order establishes the procedure for purchasing Earth observation data from private companies for the needs of state corporations, government agencies, local governments, and others who previously received such data free of charge.
Government agencies and state-owned corporations will submit procurement requests to Roscosmos. Upon receiving a request, Roscosmos will first determine whether “the data required by the customer and copies thereof are available in the federal data fund.” If such data is not available in the federal data fund, the state corporation will purchase the data from private Earth remote sensing providers.
Data from private spacecraft will be acquired after they have been assessed for their “level of technological independence from foreign technologies.”
An Important Signal for the Market
As Roscosmos believes, the introduction of this methodology sends an important signal to the market. “Value is created not only by image resolution. For a government customer, it is important to understand who controls the spacecraft, the software architecture, intellectual property rights, data management, and the protection of information resources,” a representative of the state corporation told RBC.
For space data to become a mass-market product, it is not enough to simply have satellites; clear rules are needed, a Roscosmos representative told RBC. “First, the demand for Earth observation data should be met by Russian private spacecraft—provided that such data is available and the relevant spacecraft has passed an assessment of technological independence and security. Then, the capabilities of state-owned spacecraft are considered. And only after that—if Russian sources cannot provide the necessary data—may there be grounds to consider other options, including foreign sources in cases provided for by the regulatory framework,” — the state corporation explained the sequence of actions when receiving a request for remote sensing of Earth.
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