Research Center “AeroKos”

Following the order of the All-Union Committee for Higher Education under the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, classes at the institute began in October 1942, and in 1944 the first graduation of specialists – engineering personnel in aircraft construction was carried out.

Since 1957, the institute began training specialists in rocket and space technology. In 2009, due to competitive selection, SSAU became one of the first 14 higher educational institutions in Russia, in respect of which the category “national research university” was established.

The development of its spacecraft at Samara University (then – the Kuibyshev Aviation Institute, KuAI) began in the mid-80s of the last century. The first satellites created in KuAI went into orbit in 1989. On April 28, 2016, as part of the first launch from the new Russian Vostochny cosmodrome, the small optoelectronic spacecraft (SSC) AIST-2D was launched into orbit, designed for remote sensing of the Earth, scientific experiments, as well as for testing, and certification of a new target and scientific equipment, supporting systems and their software.

Now, Samara University is a member of Project 5-100, a state program for selecting and improving the competitiveness of leading Russian universities, launched in 2013 and designed for seven years. The project to enhance the competitiveness of Russian universities assumes that by 2020 five Russian universities will enter the top 100 leading universities in the world (Project 5-100). The success of the project will be assessed by the three most authoritative world university rankings – QS, Times Higher Education and ARWU