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International Space News (ISN)

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Soyuz exits international launch market, OneWeb Courts SpaceX - Yunus Bhayat

More than a dozen non-Russian satellite missions were counting on Soyuz launches over the next year and beyond before the war in Ukraine disrupted those plans. The hardest hit was OneWeb, which was relying on Soyuz to deploy roughly 200 satellites by midyear. OneWeb typically launches 32- 36 satellites at a time (Seradata, 2022). But the London-based global communications network experienced the biggest scheduling headache without Soyuz. The low Earth orbit broadband startup, which bought all but two of the 10 missions that Soyuz flew for non-Russian customers in 2021, planned to deploy its final six batches of satellites by the middle of this year using the Russian rocket. OneWeb’s latest batch of 36 satellites had been poised to lift off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome on March 4 before

Russia imposed conditions on the launch. OneWeb subsequently suspended all further Soyuz missions. However, OneWeb may be able to significantly offset the delays caused by Soyuz with its recent announcement of a launch partnership with SpaceX. Conversely, more than a dozen former Soyuz satellite missions need new rides now that Soyuz withdrew from the international launch market, raising questions over how fast the launch market can absorb the loss of the workhorse rocket. While Russia’s share of the international launch market has shrunk, the Soyuz rocket’s sudden exit from the global stage has left more than a dozen non-Russian satellite missions without clear paths to orbit. The European Union counted on at

constellation, Euclid infrared space telescope and EarthCARE satellite; the Sentinel 1C radar satellite for Europe’s Copernicus Earth-observation programme; the Swedish National Space Agency-funded MATS microsatellite for measuring gases in Earth’s atmosphere; four GRUS remote sensing microsatellites for Japanese Earth imagery operator Axelspace; and the StriX-1 demonstration satellite for Synspective, a Japanese synthetic aperture radar (SAR) company. The Soyuz mission embargo is considered to have no imminent or future impact on SANSA Space Operations. However, the knock- on effect on international launch manifest with customers seeking alternatives to Soyuz, adding to the Ariane launch manifest, with an already existing backlog, together with the phasing out of many major heavy-lift launch vehicles, may have a negative effect on the number of launch missions; and in turn, the number of missions SANSA may be contracted to support this year onwards. From a SANSA point of view, a launch backlog will potentially adversely affect future planned missions over the next 5-10 years. ESA’s

least six Soyuz rockets this year and beyond to launch a mix of navigation, Earth observation, and science satellites from France’s South American spaceport. Stranded mission payloads in 2022/2023 include two pairs of satellites for Europe’s Galileo navigation

Image Courtesy of BBC News

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