Russia cloaks launch schedule after spaceport falls in Ukraine's sights

Most exciting events “We had serious inbound attempts to the cosmodrome that day.” Members of the Russian military supervise the installation of a European Space Agency environmental satellite on top of a modified Russian ballistic missile before a launch in 2016. Credit: ESA–Stephane Corvaja, 2016 If you believe official Russian reports, the country’s northern spaceport has come under attack from drones on multiple occasions in the last few months. The drones did not succeed in striking the spaceport, but the attempted attacks come as Russia ramps up activity at Plesetsk Cosmodrome to deploy a new constellation of Internet and data relay satellites akin to SpaceX’s Starlink, a space-based network underpinning much of Ukraine’s military communications infrastructure. Plesetsk is a military base located in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region, some 500 miles north of Moscow. The Russian space agency’s first acknowledgment of an attempted drone attack at Plesetsk came a few weeks ago, when the head of Roscosmos, the Russian state corporation for civilian spaceflight, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. Dmitry Bakanov, the general director of Roscosmos, regaled Putin with a list of Russia’s recent accomplishments in the space sector. The list was modest, at least by the standards