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SpaceX Picks Up OneWeb Launch Contracts After Russian Launches Halt

Rejected submission by takyon at 2022-03-22 09:00:06
Techonomics

SpaceX wins OneWeb launch contracts, demonstrating extreme flexibility [teslarati.com]

Demonstrating a level of flexibility that no other commercial launch provider on Earth can likely match, SpaceX and OneWeb have entered into a major launch contract barely three weeks after Russia kicked the satellite internet company off of its Soyuz rockets.

Beginning in early 2020, OneWeb has launched approximately 430 operational small internet satellites – about two-thirds of its first constellation – on a dozen different Russian Soyuz 2.1b and ST-B rockets, including a mission completed as recently as February 10th, 2022. That nominal – albeit slow – deployment ground to a violent halt alongside Russia's second unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. Within a week, extraordinary Western economic sanctions pushed the unstable head of Russia's Roscosmos space agency to retaliate by both ending the practice of European-owned Soyuz launches and holding OneWeb's 13th operational launch hostage.

Another three weeks later, outside of increasingly tense and reluctant cooperation on the International Space Station, the relationship between Russian and Western spaceflight programs has effectively ceased to exist. That includes all 6-7 of OneWeb's remaining Soyuz launch contracts, each of which the company had already paid more than $50 million for. Though OneWeb technicians were able to escape the increasingly hostile country, Russia effectively repossessed (i.e. stole) OneWeb's remaining rockets and its 13th batch of operational satellites.

That left OneWeb in an unsurprisingly precarious situation. Having already gone bankrupt once, a major delay could be financially catastrophic for the company. Normally, procuring half a dozen near-term launch contracts at the last second would be virtually impossible. Indeed, ignoring a certain US company, no other launch provider on Earth could even theoretically find or build enough capacity to launch the last third of OneWeb's constellation without at least a one or two-year delay. Luckily for OneWeb, SpaceX does exist.

Also at Space News [spacenews.com], NYT [nytimes.com], The Guardian [theguardian.com], Reuters [reuters.com], and The Verge [theverge.com]:

Just a few days before the launch was set to take place, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, demanded that Russia would only launch OneWeb's satellites if the company promised that the spacecraft would not be used for military purposes. Rogozin also demanded that the British government divest its entire stake in OneWeb. In 2020, the UK invested roughly $500 million in OneWeb [theverge.com] in order to save the company from bankruptcy, and the UK government became a major shareholder along with Indian telecommunications company Bharti Global.

OneWeb and the UK refused to submit to the demands, and the company wound up suspending all further launches of its satellites from Kazakhstan [reuters.com]. Roscosmos rolled back the Soyuz rocket carrying the 36 OneWeb satellites from its launchpad, and the satellites have yet to be returned to OneWeb. The company isn't sure what happened to the spacecraft or if they'll ever be returned. "The thing about the satellites is honestly they're the least of our problems," Chris McLaughlin, chief of government, regulatory, and engagement at OneWeb, tells The Verge. "We make two a day in the factory in Florida. So we can find ways to get a resilient solution."

Previously: SpaceX and OneWeb Clash Over Proposed Satellite Constellation Orbits [soylentnews.org]
FCC Approves SpaceX Lowering Orbit of Internet Satellites [soylentnews.org]
SpaceX Approved to Deploy 1 Million U.S. Starlink Terminals; OneWeb Reportedly Considers Bankruptcy [soylentnews.org]
Russia Places Extraordinary Demands on OneWeb Prior to Satellite Launch [soylentnews.org]


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