The Russian invasion of Ukraine has had an unexpected effect: ending decades of cooperation between the West and Russia in the aerospace industry. The result is being the massive cancellation of the takeoffs in which Russia participates, directly or indirectly. And one person has emerged as the main beneficiary of this situation: Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX has been practically without rivals overnight.
On Thursday, Russia announced it would stop selling engines to US space rockets in response to Western sanctions against the country. Of course, any planned flight using a Russian aircraft was also ruled out. At a stroke, 10 of the 18 takeoffs planned for 2022 and 2023 were cancelled. And of the remaining 8, 6 have one thing in common: they use SpaceX technology, one of the few on the planet that does not depend on Russian materials at all.
With Russia’s departure from the market, the list of organizations capable of putting rockets into orbit is drastically reduced. Among them are JAXA (the Japanese space agency), Sierra Nevada Corporation (USA) or Blue Origin, the firm of Jeff Bezos, all of them with a short-term capacity inferior to that of the Russian firms. Blue Origin is behind schedule in supplying enough engines for the Vulcan program of United Launch Alliance, the aerospace consortium of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. And the European Space Agency has been forced to paralyze the ExoMars Martian exploration program, which it was going to carry out together with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.
With this list of cancellations, the biggest beneficiary is SpaceX, the firm that has managed to launch the most rockets into space frequently and reliably in recent years without Russian technology. All his takeoffs are still underway, and everything indicates that he will start receiving many more offers in the coming months if there is not an abrupt change in the sanctions policy.
OneWeb, on canvas
But the good news for Musk doesn’t end there. SpaceX has been developing a network of satellites since 2015 to provide high-quality access to the internet around the world, called Starlink. Its main competitor is OneWeb, a consortium between the British Government and the European Airbus. The big key difference between these two firms is that OneWeb uses Russian Soyuz ships to launch its satellites, while Starlink uses ships from its parent, SpaceX.
The effect of the Russian sanctions has been to knock down the six launches scheduled by the European firm for next year, which puts its situation in doubt. This same Friday, one of the rockets has been removed from the Baikonur base (Kazakhstan) after the cancellation of the takeoff. Meanwhile, Musk has taken Stalink to the Ukraine, to provide internet to the areas affected by Russian bombing, although warning that its use may be a ‘target’ for the invading army.
The biggest question of these sanctions and the Russia-West split is how much damage it will cause to scientific research in the medium term, especially given the damage to the Mars exploration program. And, in short, the main problem is the inhabitants of the International Space Station, who have seen the list of launches that communicated them with Earth decimated. The war has reached space, in a peaceful way, but with science as the biggest victim… and Musk as the winner.
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