MOSCOW.(Yury Zaitsev for RIA Novosti). --...

Due to lower orbiting and production costs, these satellites can make affordable and wide-reaching orbital networks for telecommunication, Earth monitoring, and other applications.

Under the new Pragmatic Space Program, the state-owned producer NPOMash has designed a space platform with interchangeable payloads, from radars to optical-electronic Earth remote sensing systems - a profitable business as high-resolution imagery has been in great demand globally for some time. The Russian company offers two systems based on this platform: the Kondor-E radar expected to be put into orbit late this year or in the beginning of 2007 on the back of the Strela light launch vehicle the NPOmash has converted from the decommissioned RS-18-UR-100 (SS-19 Mod.1 Stilletto) ballistic missile, and the telecommunications satellite Ruslan-MM.

Last August, a Rokot launch vehicle (also converted from a military system) orbited the Monitor-E remote sensing satellite, a spacecraft producing as

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