The satellite internet company OneWeb, owned in part by the British government, has canceled the upcoming launch of a satellite that would have been carried out with a Russian rocket and has suspended all future launches dependent on Russia. The announcement was made by the company on Thursday (3) after a tense public confrontation with the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.
Also on Thursday, Roscosmos announced that it would stop selling rocket engines to US firms.
Taken as a result of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the measures are expected to further isolate the Russian space agency from its Western space partners and severely limit Russia’s private space activities. For OneWeb, which aimed to complete its constellation of 648 orbiting satellites later this year, the loss of a reliable supplier of rockets for launches creates unusual difficulties.
OneWeb was saved from bankruptcy in 2020 by the British government and other investors. The company planned to launch 36 satellites on Friday from a Russian Soyuz rocket that would take off from Kazakhstan. Since 2019, the company has put about 400 satellites into orbit, all using extremely robust Soyuz rockets that have been in use since the Cold War space race.
But on Wednesday (2), shortly after the Soyuz was taken to the launch pad, Dmitry Rogozin, director of the Russian space program, announced two conditions aimed at retaliating against sanctions imposed on Russia over the invasion of Ukraine: the agency spacecraft would not carry out the satellite mission unless the UK disposed of its billion-dollar stake in OneWeb and the company provided “assurances that its satellites would not be used for military purposes”.
Rogozin posted a video on Twitter showing Roscosmos employees on a platform next to the rocket, covering British, American and Japanese flags emblazoned on the outside of the rocket. “The launchers at Baikonur decided that our rocket would look better without the flags of certain countries,” said Rogozin, a former deputy prime minister who frequently posts bombast on social media.
Issued three days before the planned launch, the special agency’s ultimatum led to emergency discussions between British officials and OneWeb shareholders, who on Wednesday night decided to cease all future launches from Baikonur, the cosmodrome in Kazakhstan from which Russia makes most of their releases. Rogozin suggested on Twitter that OneWeb’s decision will plunge the company into yet another bankruptcy process.
Chris McLaughlin, director of government affairs at OneWeb, dismissed the warning.
“This is a very well-funded, debt-free company that is backed by powerful international shareholders who made the decision themselves,” he said.
The UK does not have its own capability to launch large payloads into orbit. McLaughlin said OneWeb will look at other launch provider options in Japan, India and the United States.
“We’ve always been on the lookout for the launchers universe, but this is a whole new and unprecedented situation,” McLaughlin said.
The company was saved from bankruptcy in 2020 by India’s Bharti Enterprises, its biggest shareholder, and the British government, whose $500 million public investment in the satellite operator was made to boost Britain’s space economy. Without rockets from which to launch its satellites, OneWeb’s goal of completing its megaconstellation will be seriously compromised. The company is competing with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation to broadcast broadband internet to remote regions around the world.
OneWeb had already come under pressure from British politicians to follow the example of energy companies by cutting its business ties with Russia. It paid for its Russian launches wholesale through the French rocket company Arianespace and, under the contract, still had six paid missions remaining, worth probably hundreds of millions of dollars.
In the coming days, OneWeb is expected to begin negotiations with Arianespace to determine if and how it can recover the money from suspended Soyuz missions, according to a company official who requested anonymity to speak about deliberations he is not authorized to disclose. He added that OneWeb executives are not sure when or how the 36 satellites currently in Russia for the now-canceled mission scheduled for Friday will be taken off the rocket, nor where they will be stored while OneWeb looks for one. different release provider.
Russia’s move to cripple the business of one of its space agency’s biggest commercial clients is perhaps the biggest example yet of how the war in Ukraine is reaching into space, an area in which Russia has cooperated for decades with countries that were their opponents in the Cold War.
Last week Roscosmos withdrew more than 80 Russian professionals from French Guiana, where the European Space Agency has its only launch pad and from where it launches commercial missions with Soyuz rockets. Then the European agency announced that a joint robotic mission of it and Russia scheduled to launch this year bound for Mars now has very little chance of leaving on schedule. And on Thursday, Roscosmos announced that it would stop cooperating with Germany on joint research projects on the space station.
With the barrage of sanctions imposed by the West over the invasion, it seemed inevitable that Roscosmos would become isolated from its Western partners, said Victoria Samson, a space policy analyst at the Secure World Foundation.
“The fact that the Russian space agency is self-isolating is not a good sign,” she said. “Maybe it’s just that Russia is getting ahead of the severing of ties that could soon happen anyway. But now it’s being done on her terms.”
NASA, which jointly manages the International Space Station with Roscosmos, said it intends to continue cooperating with its Russian counterparts. The two partners had been negotiating a deal to launch Russian astronauts on the Crew Dragon, a SpaceX vehicle that carries NASA astronauts.
In addition to cooperation with NASA, Russia said on Thursday it would suspend the sale of rocket engines to US companies.
“In a situation like this, we cannot supply the best rocket engines in the world to the United States,” Rogozin said on Russian state television. “Let them fly on something else. Let them fly on their broomsticks, I don’t know.”
The frost could most seriously affect Northrop Grumman, which uses Russian-made engines in its Antares launch vehicle, which transports cargo to the space station for NASA. SpaceX also provides this service to the space station, as well as spacecraft launched by Japan and Russia.
Translation by Clara Allain
