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...