If there was one area preserved by the geopolitical upheavals since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is the privileged space cooperation between Russians and Europeans. And there, in a few hours, everything shattered. On Saturday February 26, in a tweet, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Roscosmos agency, thundered: “In response to European Union sanctions against our companies, Roscosmos is suspending cooperation with its European partners to organize space launches since Kourou base and will recall its personnel, including the consolidated launch crew, from French Guiana.” Neither one nor two, from the morning of this Saturday, the gendarmerie carried out security actions around the river hotel and the army around the Guiana Space Center (CSG).
“A usual measure to regulate the movement of Russians on our territory”, assures a source from the National Center for Space Studies (Cnes). A total of 87 people of Russian nationality are in Guyana to launch the Soyuz rockets. All of them work for NPO Lavochkin (Fregat-MT upper stage), Progress RCC (Soyuz manufacturer) and TsENKI (infrastructure) under an agreement dating back to 1996 (which saw the creation of the Russian-European company Starsem ).
Bad news for Arianespace
On the side of the French space agency which manages the CSG, we “take note” of Roscosmos’ decision, “while facilitating the departure of Russian nationals” before “anticipate an inevitable reorganization” of the space base for the next month. So much for stewardship. But the most affected by this desertion remains Arianespace, the European marketing company, which had planned in its 2022 calendar, 8 Soyuz launches: 3 from the CSG, and 5 from the Baikonur cosmodrome (Kazakhstan). One of those recorded from Guyana already took place on February 10, putting 34 more satellites into orbit for the Anglo-Indian OneWeb constellation.
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This interruption undermines its order book and, above all, weakens its agreement with OneWeb, whose founder, the American Greg Wyler, could terminate the contract (16 launches with Soyuz for its constellation) and turn to launchers of its countries – Space X, Boeing or even Blue Origin. A hard blow in perspective while Europe, in full Ariane 5 / Ariane 6 transition, has no alternative solution to offer (Ariane 5 and the small Vega, the other launchers available from Arianespace, are not compatible in terms of performance). “Contracts in the space field are difficult to unravel and I think it is complicated to cancel them overnight, explains Xavier Pasco, director of the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS). not necessarily an immediate alternative solution, the order books of the launch companies being already well filled. There is little flexibility.”
The EU minimizes the consequences of the Russian departure of Kourou
For the time being, Arianespace officials “do not wish to comment” on a particularly delicate situation: beyond OneWeb, the company was counting on the Soyuz to put much more crucial satellites into orbit. Starting with the launch, which was scheduled for April 6, of two Galileo navigation satellites – the European positioning system whose deployment continues to operate.
Ditto, but to a lesser extent for Copernicus, Europe’s other flagship program for monitoring and observing the Earth, which does not depend directly on Soyuz: its components, the Sentinel satellites, have launch dates spread over time (the next one, Sentinel-4 is due to take off in 2023) and does not depend directly on the Soyuz.
All this did not prevent Thierry Breton, the commissioner in charge of European space policy, from reacting very quickly, assuring that the withdrawal of Roscosmos from Kourou would have “no consequence on the continuity and quality of Galileo services and of Copernicus”, and “nor calls into question the continuity of the development of these infrastructures.” And the Frenchman to specify: “We will take, in due time, all the necessary decisions in response and resolutely pursue the development of the second generation of these two sovereign space infrastructures of the Union.”
Finally, the suspension of cooperation between the Russians and Arianespace also has an impact on other institutional missions that are even more critical for France: by the end of the year, the Soyuz was to ensure the orbiting of the satellite CSO-3 spy, last component of the Multinational Space-based Imaging System (MUSIS) armament program allowing us to acquire images for military use.
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Originally, this machine was to take off on board an Ariane 6 rocket, but the emergency had led the French authorities to switch it to a Soyuz. Our armies will have to wait. “There can be a beneficial effect in this situation: that Europe accelerates the Ariane 6 program to make it fly earlier”, hopes Xavier Pasco. But more generally, this crisis definitively reveals that the Europeans and Arianespace have relied too much on the Soyuz in recent years, particularly in the context of the various slippages and delays of the Ariane 6 program. Soyuz had imposed itself as a “back-up” natural. Negotiations had also been underway for several months for an extension of the Russians’ contract in Kourou beyond 2023. An option that evaporated in the skies of Guyana.
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