Russia Proposes Creating Space Council With BRICS Partners

Russia is pushing for the creation of a council with its BRICS partners to coordinate cooperation in space. The council’s work would include exchanging satellite data, joint missions and the use of relevant orbital networks.

The structure is already being formed, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Bakanov told Bloomberg in New Delhi, where the BRICS summit is being held.

As the publication noted, Russia seeks to deepen technological ties with India and China while turning BRICS into a broader platform for cooperation outside Western-led institutions.

According to Bakanov, the Space Council has been proposed, and its formation is already underway.

According to him, the proposal to create the new body was put forward last year, but it still needs to go through the approval process among BRICS members.

The proposed body will not be an analogue of the European Space Agency for BRICS, he stressed, but it will help refine decisions agreed at the bloc level and monitor their implementation by member states.

Over the past 18 months, Moscow has provided India with high-resolution satellite imagery covering about 100,000 square kilometers. The exchange is part of a BRICS initiative under which participants share satellite imagery.

According to Bakanov, Russia and India are also discussing joint work on rocket engines and scientific experiments aboard future orbital stations.

In mid-August, Ukraine’s Defense Forces significantly damaged the Progress center in Samara, Russia, in a missile strike. It is the only enterprise in Russia engaged in serial assembly of Soyuz-2 launch vehicles. Ukrainian forces used FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles to attack the strategic facility.

Two strikes hit Building 106A, where Russian personnel install onboard electrical equipment, control systems, cable networks and instrument compartments for the rockets. The destruction of the workshop will have a critical impact on the production process, as this is where the control system is installed and key onboard components are tested before final assembly.

At the beginning of September, one of the main production buildings at the Proton-PM plant near Perm, which specializes in the production of liquid-fuel rocket engines, burned down for unknown reasons. In 2025, the company launched serial production of RD-191 engines for Angara launch vehicles at its new production site.

As a result, production facilities for both launch vehicle programs used by Russia were affected in August and September.

This threatens compliance with the launch schedule once the existing stockpile of ready-to-launch rockets is depleted.