Russia, China agree on joint use of GLONASS, Beidou navigation systems

MOSCOW, May 8. /TASS/. Russia and China have agreed on the mutual operation of the GLONASS and Beidou navigation systems. A joint statement to this effect was signed at a special ceremony following negotiations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the Kremlin on Friday. Both leaders were present at the event. The head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos Igor Komarov and chief of the Chinese commission for the satellite navigation system Wang Li put their signatures to the document. Earlier, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the two countries were coming close to joint production of receivers for the Beidou and GLONASS navigation systems. In his opinion, cooperation between national navigation systems looks reasonable at a time when NATO member-countries jointly use similar resources. "The Chinese navigation system is finding its feet. For the time being it has regional coverage only, but in the longer term it will go international. While the GPS and Galileo function as a pair of navigation systems available to all NATO member-countries, we see chances of active cooperation by Russian and Chinese navigation systems. The more so, since China’s satellite cluster is the world’s largest," Rogozin said. Read more