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Russian Invasion and its impact on Space Launches

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ecarfan

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This is unconfirmed. There are conflicting reports. Ecarfan's first post for the thread has an article that details this.
According to Twitter reports, Yuzhnoye & Yuzhmash in the Ukraine have been completely destroyed in the Ukraine war ( confirmation pending). So if this is confirmed, further production of #Antares rockets for ISS supply won't be possible, as the 1st stage body is built there.
 
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Eric Berger’s report on Roscosmos employees leaving the ESA spaceport in French Guiana, abandoning a Galileo (Europe’s GPS system) satellite launch on a Soyuz rocket that was scheduled for April 6th.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/russia-pulls-out-of-european-spaceport-abandoning-a-planned-launch/

The article does not explicitly say that the launch will now have to be cancelled, but the statement by the ESA does not say that the launch will proceed. It does say that ESA does not have a suitable alternate launch vehicle available on short notice, and that probably only SpaceX could step in with a suitable vehicle.

I think it likely that in the near future Roscosmos will tell the NASA astronauts currently training in Russia to go home now that the US has implemented sanctions against Russia and agreed with the Europeans to cut off 10 Russian banks from the SWIFT banking system.
 
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Space News article on the FG exodus:

Yeah...oneweb is pretty screwed. They have an Ariane 6 configuration that of course isn't going to do them much good in the near term, and while one could imagine that can get ported back to A5, its not like there's a ton of them getting built.
 
.... imagine how screwed we would be w/o Space X....

It depends on how you define "screwed". In the context of launch capacity, in a world where there's no spaceX the other heavy lifters probably pick up most of the slack. SpaceX's non-starlink mission rate is something like once a month. Overlay that rate with the low annual rates of Ariane, ULA, and Mitsubishi over the past few years [as a result of SpaceX offering a lower priced equivalent service] and its pretty close to a wash.
 
Scott Manley on the issues:
And as it happens, Scott opens his latest video with the Antares/Cygnus launch and mentions that the vehicle “includes the first operational station reboost by one of the US operational cargo spacecraft..It’s going add a 0.5m/s increase…and the spacecraft will have to flip into a different orientation to do this”. How fortuitous and timely, making Rogozin look foolish once again (not that he needs any assistance).

Later in the video, when discussing the situation with Russia, Scott says that Dragon could be used for ISS attitude control and reboost as is if new software was implemented but that it is not as capable as Cygnus because the Cygnus engines are oriented on its long axis.

Scott also states that the ISS can maintain its orbit “for several years” without a reboost. So if the Russians withdraw from the ISS the US has plenty of time to figure out how to maintain its orbit.
 
As noted upthread, OW is pretty screwed. Rogozin is basically demanding that they not be used for military communication (which they are, or at least that's to whom OW has been shopping, among other customers), and that the UK government give up its ownership stake.

"The launchers at Baikonur decided that without the flags of some countries, our rocket would look more beautiful."

 
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia has decided to stop supplying rocket engines to the United States in retaliation for its sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, Dmitry Rogozin, head of the state space agency Roscosmos, said on Thursday.

“In a situation like this we can’t supply the United States with our world’s best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don’t know what,” Rogozin said on state Russian television.
Rogozin is such an idiot. He lives in a fantasy land inside his own head.
 
This article was published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal.
Russia Casts Doubt on Future Participation in International Space Station — Roscosmos is skeptical about continuing to use the space station after 2024 given new sanctions relating to the Ukraine invasion, according to the Russian state news agency Tass. A spokesman for Roscosmos confirmed the agency is questioning whether to continue helping to operate the facility beyond what Moscow currently permits.
It’s a short step from Russia potentially formally announcing soon that it will not support the ISS in 2024 to saying that it is bringing its cosmonauts back to Earth next month and not replacing them.
 
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Rogozin is such an idiot. He lives in a fantasy land inside his own head.

IMO, he knows what he's doing.

Rogozin's audience is specifically nationalists who find comfort and safety under the blanket of xenophobic rhetoric expressed by [someone who they feel portrays] a strong-leader and with [what they define as] overt patriotic overtones, preferably with an healthy dose of "pwn the others!" arrogance, and ideally presented in a relatable-to-the-everyday-person manner. For that kind of audience, the existence of logic or facts in support of the messaging is irrelevant; its all about confirmation of beliefs and has nothing to do with exploration of truth. No facts? No problem. Just make some up that fit the narrative the people want to hear.

From that perspective, IMO Rogozin should be getting some serious performance bonuses!

***If anyone didn't pick up on the obvious parallelism in my description of Rogozin's audience relative to a similar audience closer to most of our homes, let me know. ;)
 
Just to catch up on status, the OW team is leaving Baikonur. They're taking a "can't get there from here" way home, since the typical route through Moscow [on a charter] is, obviously, not an option. Hopefully they take some R&R in Dubai on the way home.

Its hard to say if its symbolic or not given Dima's "I said it first" ultimatum, but OW has canceled their launch program using Soyuz. Its a bit of a kerfuffle as they're really launching through Ariane (its sort of like western programs going through ILS to launch on Proton...when that used to be a thing...), so no telling who is going to get what money back from whom. The good news for OW is that money is less of a problem now that they're the Boris & Bharti show, but finding a launch partner in a timely manner will still be difficult. Ariane 6 is a ways off, Ariane 5s are spoken for, and Vega is tiny (and I feel like there may be some Ukranian or Russian content on it? Not totally sure). ISRO is generally a problem for US customers on the US side (the sats are made in the US), but maybe the UK/Indian ownership of OW changes that math? Either way they're not exactly setting the world on fire with their launch rate/capacity (launch rate is one of the main reasons OW went with Soyuz in the first place) so that will be a problem. Mitsubishi seems pretty content hucking up a couple rockets a year and they're very traditional in their timelines, so don't expect any OW launches through them for at least 2-3 years, if not longer...and that's not even factoring in inevitable delays in H3 ramp up relative to the inevitable premature ramp-down of H2. On the American side, ULA has pretty much all the Atlases booked, Blue is still figuring out how to spell "ROCKET", and Electron can only launch one OW at a time...with like 200 more sats to go to fill out the constellation, that's a lot of launches...

Did I forget anyone?

Anyway, moving on, the big issue is that the OW constellation isn't built out to a materially serviceable level yet and the sats that are on orbit are burning lifetime. And because they're all polar orbits, its pretty untenable to reconfigure the on-orbit sats to provide some salable coverage, even if they were willing to sabotage lifetime (by burning a lot of propellant) to do so. Its also unclear what's going to happen with the OW sats sitting on top of that rocket. Best guess is that the satellites aren't ITAR controlled (if they are, DTSA is going ape right now), but even though OW isn't searching through the couch cushions those sats still represent a significant amount of capital.

Continuing the link-an-article-people-are-reading-anyway game, Tory says All Your Motors Are Belong To Us. So...at least via a first order evaluation, there's no major impact to Atlas 5. Antares, however, is done proper. Like the rabbit. There's been some "Dimitri is dumb because he doesn't know Cygnus can raise ISS" chatter lately; while not obvious to all when he started threatening the demise of ISS, his comments already included the logic that Antares/Cygnus is effectively grounded.

Not exactly related but still more or less on topic, the USAF says China is our competition in space, not Russia. Rogozin's tears aside, and even accounting for this one potentially being a bit of American posturing, it makes sense. The whole world is happy to send the equivalent of gazillions of dollars to China for all manner of things, and The Chinese Man is happy to convert that financial windfall into advancing China's global posture in all manner of areas (including space)...while astutely avoiding major military conflict and the corollary, if not self-evident (to everyone except Vlad, I guess) downside of being an aggressor in today's global sociopolitical environment. Russia, OTOH, is clinging on to the dying fossil fuel industry as their major source of revenue, and its becoming clear Vlad can barely hold on to enough change to keep the lights on.

Maintaining my overt political commentary, hopefully this will be a wake up call to the unnamed American political party that refuses to accept that we need to evolve our energy strategy from the last century...
 
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Looks like the Soyuz dumpster fire over the last few weeks is fixin' to turn into a full on Clown Show. TLDR, there's a number of Arianespace missions beyond OW that are scheduled to launch on Soyuz this year that are properly hosed. Ariane doesn't have anywhere near existing capacity to recover those missions in any reasonable amount of time, nor the ability to scale up to any useful capacity.

As implied in the previous post, SpaceX is really the only solution with any chance of ramping up to the lift capacity necessary to get these rideless missions on orbit. Certainly the SX sales team is fielding non-stop inquiries right now, and one could imagine the potential revenue being pretty useful. There are also of course a few bumps in the road...notably that a) the non-starlink manifest this year is pretty packed (to say nothing about perpetual starlink aspirations), b) there's not a PR upside like SX gets when they send a couple starlink terminals to various disaster areas, and c) Ariane has to accept swallowing Rogozin's poison pill prescribed to to OW (= Ariane would have to use SX to solve their capacity problem).

Interesting times, these.
 
Wow. That is a LOT of stranded satellites and launches. One Web really got the shaft. I wonder how many of those customers have already dropped a lot of money for those launches. I wonder if some of them have already paid in full. The comments in the Space News articles are always very informative.

The commentary section was speculating that it is somewhat likely the Russian space program might be completely dead. What a sad tragedy that will be.