Russia places extraordinary demands on OneWeb prior to satellite launch

Russia has placed a number of demands on OneWeb and its government ownership before a planned launch of satellites Friday.

The 14th launch of OneWeb satellites was to be lofted into the sky. Out of a planned total of OneWeb wanted to begin commercial service around the world later this year.

The majority of those satellites have been launched on Russian Soyuz rockets, one of the few boosters in the world with spare lift capacity for a megaconstellation. The OneWeb constellation was to be completed later this year with six more Soyuz launches.

The plans were thrown into question by the invasion of Ukraine. Since the invasion, OneWeb, which is owned by the United Kingdom government and an Indian multinational company, has not offered any public comments.

Some UK members of parliament have said it would be inappropriate for OneWeb to continue using Russian rockets. On Tuesday, the UK government issued a statement, saying that it was right for questions to be raised about future space cooperation with Russia.

Big demands

All the while, Russia's main space corporation, Roscosmos, had been preparing the Soyuz rocket for launch, even rolling it out to the launch pad this week with the 34 satellites bundled into the payload fairing at its tip. The chief of Russia's space program issued two demands before agreeing to the launch. He said that OneWeb must guarantee that its satellites won't be used for military purposes. The UK government must give up its ownership of OneWeb.

These demands are not seem to be doable. The United Kingdom is one of the countries that OneWeb has pitched on using OneWeb satellites to facilitate rich networks of data for enhanced decision-making during military activities. The UK government can't agree to Russian demands about what it does and doesn't own.

It was thought that OneWeb would go ahead with the launch despite the public backlash because it was better to let the satellites fall into Russian hands. This was likely to be the last OneWeb launch on a Russian rocket. The launch is not certain to happen.

The actions taken by Rogozin will have wide-ranging effects. Western demand for Russian launch and space services is certain to end in the near term. The relationship between Russia's space program and the West has already been broken, including the delay of the ExoMars collaboration. The International Space Station partnership is the only one that NASA and Roscosmos are still committed to. Even this strong bond seems shaky in the light of this week's events.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, OneWeb has not made any public comments, either on social media or its website. It is having conversations with its owners about how to manage things. There are very few options for getting satellites into space if the company must move off of Soyuz launches.

Few options

Europe has no spare launch capacity and the Ariane 6 rocket is at least two years away from being operational. OneWeb and India's space program agreed to use Indian rockets for future satellite launches. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, these rockets have not demonstrated a high launch cadence, and it is not clear whether India's PSLV or GSLV Mk. There will be several batches of OneWeb satellites in the next 12 to 24 months.

That leaves the option of using the Falcon 9 rocket as a viable option. The problem with this is that the company has its own satellite internet network. The price for a competitor's satellites would not be cheap. OneWeb wouldn't want to enrich the company trying to improve its own satellite network.

When the world is falling apart, it's hard to bring the world closer together.