SPACEFLIGHT Ukraine conflict

Ukraine – implications for international spaceflight

PAT NORRIS FRAeS from the RAeS Space Specialist Group assesses the widening impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on the co-operation and partnership in the spaceflight sector, joint missions and commercial launches.

The International Space Station.

There are now a number of expanding effects, as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which cover satellites, launchers and international cooperation in spaceflight. Let’s take a look at some of the main ones.

What now for ExoMars?

Two space programmes of great importance to the UK have been impacted by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The Rosalind Franklin rover developed by Airbus in Stevenage, Herts, was to have been launched this year for its mission to explore the surface of Mars, representing the main element of ExoMars, a joint European Space Agency (ESA)-Russia programme. On 17 March, the 22 member states⁽¹⁾of ESA voted unanimously to suspend co-operation with Russia on ExoMars. ESA will now initiate a ‘fast-track’ industrial study to examine alternative approaches to undertaking the mission, made difficult because the Russian role currently involves not only the Proton launcher but also a lander that transports ESA’s rover to the Martian surface, and radioisotope heating units plus instruments on the rover itself. As a consequence, ESA Director General, Josef Aschbacher, said that a launch before 2026 was unrealistic and added “even that is very challenging”.

The second big impact of the crisis on UK space ambitions is the cancellation or postponement of seven scheduled launches of the Soyuz rocket, each carrying approximately 30 OneWeb communications satellites. The British government bought a stake in OneWeb to help the company emerge from bankruptcy in 2020. Without those seven Soyuz launches, only two-thirds of the planned 648 satellites are in orbit, preventing OneWeb from offering a global 24-hour service.

US and UK flags were covered up on the OneWeb Soyuz rocket by Roscosmos. @Rogozin/Twitter

The impact works both ways, with Russia losing out on the payments for the cancelled launches. However, on 21 March OneWeb announced that it had negotiated a deal with SpaceX to launch the satellites with the first launch expected later this year. Details of the arrangement were not made public nor was any mention made of the irony of SpaceX helping a rival of its Starlink service or of OneWeb paying launcher fees to its rival.

Other launches cancelled by Russia include two pairs of Europe’s Galileo navigation satellites, planned for April and September this year, a French CSO military reconnaissance satellite in December and two ESA science missions – the Euclid astronomy probe in February 2023 and the EarthCARE environmental observatory in March 2023. All 85 Russian staff at the launch site in French Guiana, where six of these launches were to have taken place, have been repatriated. Aschbacher stated on 17 March that ESA was assessing alternative launch services for these missions, including possible use of the exploitation (ie test) flights of the new Ariane 6 rocket – the first of which is scheduled for the second half of 2022.

European Commissioner Thierry Breton said on 26 February that cancellation of the two Galileo launches: “has no consequences on the continuity and quality of the Galileo services”. Three days earlier US National Reconnaissance Office Director Christopher Scolese noted that Russia has disrupted satnav services in the past (presumably referring to their jamming and spoofing of GPS in Syria) and said it is easy to imagine them doing the same in Ukraine. It seems likely, therefore, that the quality of Galileo service will be compromised for users close to the conflict region at least some of the time. On 17 March the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA – not to be confused with ESA) warned of disruption to GPS services in various parts of north eastern and south eastern Europe⁽²⁾, widely reported to be the result of Russian jamming activities.

For the moment, Russia’s highest-profile collaboration in space, the International Space Station (ISS), is relatively unaffected by the crisis. Three Russian cosmonauts are currently on board, alongside three American and one ESA (German) astronauts. The return to Earth of US astronaut Mark Vande Hei on 30 March in a Russian Soyuz capsule with two Russian cosmonauts suggested ‘business as usual’ at least to some extent. Day-to-day ISS operations are continuing normally but it is unclear if future activities and crew changes will proceed exactly as planned – given high-profile headlines about the outspoken head of Roscosmos (and a former Russian Deputy Premier), Dmitry Rogozin. He has threatened to withdraw Russia from the ISS, claiming this would leave the station unable to maintain a stable attitude and orbit – a claim that seems to contain at least an element of truth.

The US Antares rocket uses a Ukrainian first stage and Russian engines. NASA

Weaning the US off Russian engines

Following the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea, the US decided to end its dependence on Russian rocket technology for its military launches – in particular the RD-180 rocket manufactured by Russia’s NPO Energomash which powered the first stage of the Atlas 5 rocket engine manufactured by America’s ULA. The last six RD-180s were delivered to ULA in April 2021 which should allow Atlas 5 launches to continue until the BE-4 engine, being developed by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, is available to replace the RD-180. The first launch of the resulting Vulcan Centaur rocket is expected before the end of 2022.

Another US rocket manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, is dependent on technology from both Russia and Ukraine. Its Antares 230 launcher incorporates a first stage assembled by the Yuzmash company in Dnipro in eastern Ukraine and using two RD-181 engines supplied by Russia’s NPO Energomash. The Antares 230 regularly carries cargo to the ISS and Northrop Grumman says that it has the material at its Wallops Island (Virginia, US) launch site required for the upcoming launches in August 2022 and April 2023. There have been unconfirmed reports of severe war damage at the Dnipro factory, so Antares 230 launches beyond these two must be in doubt. The all-American SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher is the US’ other ISS supply rocket.

The US is not alone in being hooked on Russian rocket technology – Europe is too. A Yuzmash RD-843 engine from Dnipro is used in the fourth stage of ESA’s Vega and Vega C launchers, and the fuel tanks of that fourth stage are supplied by NPO Lavochkin, based just outside Moscow. Italy’s Avio which is the Vega prime-contractor stated on 25 March that already-delivered engines and parts mean that it “does not see specific risks related to the availability of engines in the medium term”. Stéphane Israël, boss of launch operator Arianespace, confirmed on 23 March that the three Vega launches planned for 2022, including the first launch of Vega C in May, will go ahead⁽³⁾.

Several start-up companies involved in the development of small launchers in the US and Europe are dependent on Ukrainian technology or know-how, including Firefly Aerospace in Texas, Launcher in California, Rocket Factory Augsburg in Germany and Spark Orbital in the Var region of France. The UK’s Skyrora has strong Ukrainian connections, including several dozen employees in Dnipro, working on research and development of new manufacturing methods and materials. The impacts on the plans of these companies have not yet been made public.

Satellite communications

As Russian forces invaded Ukraine on 24 February the ground infrastructure of the KA-SAT geostationary satellite was hit by a powerful cyberattack.

Space Center’s Soyuz rocket transporter with Ukraine invasion markings. Dmitry Rogozin via Twitter

The satellite’s US owner, Viasat, stated that airlines and US government clients were unaffected but that the cyber-attack did impact several thousand customers located in Ukraine and tens of thousands of other fixed broadband customers across Europe.

The incident led to calls by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk requesting the delivery of terminals for the SpaceX Starlink system and the initiation of Starlink services in Ukraine. By 22 March thousands of Starlink terminals had been delivered to Ukraine according to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell.

A more subtle impact of the crisis on the world’s communications satellite sector is the lack of availability of the giant Antonov An-124 cargo aircraft regularly used to transport large satellites the often thousands of miles from where they have been manufactured to the launch site. A recent example was the transport of Intelsat 6-F1 from Toulouse to Japan in December 2021.

Most of the few An-124s available to non-Russian users have now been requisitioned for military use so logistics experts are having to consider other large cargo aircraft, such as the C-5 Galaxy, or the Airbus Beluga XL, or the maritime option, all of which are problematic in one way or another.

Conclusions

For the moment, the shooting war has not reached space but the impact of the crisis is being felt by space programmes across the globe. One unexpected side effect is the increased interest in imagery and other forms of surveillance from privately operated space companies. Scenes of Russian military forces and of the damage in Ukraine taken from space have been one of the few sources of reliable information about the course of the conflict.

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(1) Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom

(2) EASA publishes SIB to warn of intermittent GNSS outages near Ukraine conflict areas | EASA (europa.eu).

(3) C’est le Salon Qui Redémarre; Mouriaux, P-F; Air & Cosmos, 1 April 2022.

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