Russia’s Bureau 1440 space company has launched 16 broadband internet satellites, taking an early step toward building a low-Earth orbit network that officials describe as a domestic alternative to SpaceX’s Starlink.

The satellites were launched at 8:24 p.m. on Monday and have since been placed under the company’s mission control after reaching their target reference orbit, Bureau 1440 said in a Telegram statement.

“The launch of the first satellites in the target constellation marks the transition from experiments to the creation of a communications service,” the company said.

The launch is part of Russia’s broader Rassvet project, which it aims to expand significantly over the coming years as Moscow works to develop a sovereign satellite internet network.

The system is intended to be comparable in concept, though not yet in scale, to billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation.

Starlink has played a significant role in the war in Ukraine.

Officials in Kyiv said in February that, following coordination with SpaceX, they had shifted to a “whitelist” system designed to keep authorised Ukrainian terminals online while blocking suspected unauthorised Russian use.