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.

“OK, then.”

However, that changed in 2018 when Putin publicly announced the program's creation. He recently recalled this in remarks that were recorded by RIA Novosti's Telegram channel. They were translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell.

"At first it was called Ehfir," Putin said. "And at one of my public speeches I was talking and said it was Sfera. I arrived at the Kremlin, and the former Roscosmos head greeted me and said, 'Vladimirovich, you said it was project Sfera, Sfera you said. That's what it is, project Sfera.'"

Rogozin, who was listening to these remarks, acted immediately—presumably to save his boss from embarrassment. After Rogozin said the constellation was named Sphere, Putin recalled that he asked how's that? Rogozin replied that it had already been renamed Sfera and not to worry.

Laughing, Putin added, "So I didn't even make it back and it's already renamed to Sfera. So I said, well, OK then." Rogozin confirmed the anecdote on his Telegram channel this week.

Despite the name change, the program only moved slowly forward. According to a Roscosmos press release issued at the beginning of 2022, the Sphere program was hampered by the need for "colossal government spending" on other projects, including dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, just weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine, which has had serious consequences for the country's ability to invest in a space program.

A paltry sum

Roscosmos said it was spending a little less than $100 million on the program in 2021, and about the same amount in 2022. This hardly seems like enough funding to launch an ambitious satellite program. For example, the OneWeb broadband constellation has fewer than 600 satellites, and it likely cost between $5 billion and $10 billion to get into orbit.

The constellation's first Internet satellite, Skif-D, launched into orbit in October 2022. It was intended to serve as a testbed to demonstrate capabilities as Russia plans the development of the larger Sphere constellation. It is not clear what the status of other Sphere satellites is, however.

Earlier this month, at the International Astronautical Congress in Azerbaijan, the new leader of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, referenced the Sphere constellation. Now, he said, plans for the constellation will include the capacity to provide direct-to-cell communications, which necessarily means that some of these satellites will be very large.

It seems equally likely that the more ambitious elements of Sphere will, at some point in the future, disappear into the ether.