Enlarge / Within minutes of Thursday's scrub, technicians were on the pad in Baikonur with the fully fueled rocket. (credit: NASA TV)

On Thursday a crew of three people was due to launch on a Soyuz rocket, bound for the International Space Station.

However, the launch scrubbed at about 20 seconds before the planned liftoff time, just before the sequence to ignite the rocket's engines was initiated, due to unspecified issues. Shortly after the abort, there were unconfirmed reports of an issue with the ground systems supporting the Soyuz rocket.

The three people inside the Soyuz spacecraft, on top of the rocket, were NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus. This Soyuz MS-25 mission had been planned for liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 13:21 UTC (6:21 pm local time in Baikonur).

Enlarge / Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Roscosmos Space Corporation Chief Yuri Borisov peruse an exhibit while visiting the Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia last October. (credit: Contributor/Getty Images)

Russia's Duma, the lower house of the nation's federal legislature, passed a new law earlier this month that directs the Roscosmos State Corporation to make purchases through a closed bidding process.

According to the Interfax news agency, the legislation expands the list of corporations, including Roscosmos subsidiaries and other "legal entities," that must participate in the government contract procurement processes via a closed bidding process.

Passage of the amendment by the Duma, which is dominated by President Vladimir Putin's "United Russia" political party, signals that it will almost certainly become the law of the land. Based on the Russian news report, translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell, the idea for the law came from Roscosmos, the sprawling corporation that operates the majority of the country's civil and military space programs.

Enlarge / Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Roscosmos Space Corporation Chief Yuri Borisov peruse an exhibit while visiting the Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, October 26, 2023, in Korolev, Russia. (credit: Contributor/Getty Images)

Based on preliminary data, nearly 2,400 spacecraft have been launched into orbit this year. A significant majority of these, about 75 percent, were Starlink satellites built and flown by SpaceX. But other countries, such as China, have also built and launched hundreds of satellites this year.

There has been a dramatic growth in the production and launch of satellites into low-Earth orbit in recent years due to a few different trends. One is the commercialization of satellite production. Satellites for Earth observation and communication are becoming smaller and more affordable, and thanks to rideshare options, it costs less to launch them.

Second, and most importantly, is the emergence of satellite megaconstellations that provide low-latency broadband Internet. Most prominent among these is SpaceX's Starlink constellation, but it is far from alone. In addition to the nearly 4,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, OneWeb has about 600 operational spacecraft. Other commercial constellations, including Amazon's Project Kuiper, are also coming. And both China and the European Union have announced plans to develop megaconstellations for communications purposes.

Enlarge / Russia President Vladimir Putin and Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin shake hands during a meeting at the Konstantin Palace. (credit: Mikhail MetzelTASS via Getty Images)

It was always abundantly clear that the leader of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos from 2018 to 2022, Dmitry Rogozin, sought to kowtow to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now we have an anecdote from Putin himself that highlights how much.

The story concerns a satellite constellation now known as Sfera (or Sphere, in English), a modestly ambitious constellation of 264 satellites. The Sphere constellation is intended to provide broadband Internet service from middle-Earth orbit to Russia and high-resolution Earth observation satellites.

As is usual with Russian space projects, because they tend to be poorly funded, the timeline for Sphere's deployment has been delayed and its scope reduced. It also underwent an unscheduled name change. Before 2018, this satellite program was known as Ehfir (Ether), a reference to the invisible substance once thought to fill the universe and the medium through which light waves propagated.

Enlarge / Russia's Nauka module is seen attached to the International Space Station. (credit: Roscosmos)

NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli looked out of the large windows on the International Space Station on Monday afternoon and saw that it was snowing in space.

Well, not really snowing. But there were flakes flying by that looked a lot like flurries. They emanated from one of two radiators that service the "Nauka" science module attached to the Russian segment of the space station. The flakes were frozen coolant, and as a protective measure, she and other crew members on the orbiting laboratory closed the shutters on the US segment windows.

Moghbeli and the other crew members were never in any real danger from the radiator leak, but the problem does raise serious concerns about the viability of Russian hardware in space. That is because this is the third such leak that has occurred with Russian equipment in less than a year.

Enlarge / Russia outlined a plan for future spaceflight activities this week. (credit: IAC/Roscosmos)

The leader of Russia's space corporation, Yuri Borisov, discussed his country's future ambitions in space on Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress. He spoke expansively about Russia's plans to build a new space station in low-Earth orbit, the Russian Orbital Station, as well as other initiatives.

"We are expecting to design, manufacture, and launch several modules by 2027," Borisov said via a translator at the conference, which is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, this year. The conference's plenary sessions are being livestreamed on YouTube.

This space station will reside in a polar orbit, Borisov added, allowing it to observe the entire planet's surface. Its purpose will be to test new materials, new technologies, and new medicines. “It will be like a permanently functioning laboratory,” he said.