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Roscosmos Shelves Rocket Launch Plans for Maritime Satcom Firm OneWeb

Roscosmos
Roscosmos workers use contact paper to cover over an American flag on the side of OneWeb's latest Soyuz launch rocket. The Russian space agency has threatened to cancel the launch unless Britain divests its ownership stake in OneWeb (Courtesy Roscosmos)

Published Mar 2, 2022 11:01 PM by The Maritime Executive

Russian state-owned rocket company Roscosmos has announced that it is detaining a batch of satellites owned by maritime satcom operator OneWeb. The satellites were scheduled for launch next week, but due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and punishing Western sanctions on Moscow, new tensions have arisen in the partnership. 

OneWeb is partially owned by the British government, which helped bring the firm out of bankruptcy by taking a $500 million stake in 2020. In a video statement, Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin demanded that the British government divest its holdings in OneWeb, or the launch would be canceled and the satellite payload would be detained indefinitely in Russia. Rogozin also asked for assurances that the satellites would not be used for defense-related purposes. 

Rogozin also released a video showing workers defacing the exterior of the rocket in order to remove the British, American and Japanese flags. All three nations have imposed heavy sanctions on Russia  to penalize Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine. 

The announcement appears to have come as a surprise. Until Thursday, Rogozin had expressed positive views about the launch on social media, and OneWeb chief of government relations Chris McLaughlin told The Verge that he had been encouraged about the prospect for continued cooperation.

Rogozin's demands are a non-starter with the British government, UK secretary of state for business Kwasi Kwarteng said in a social statement. “There’s no negotiation on OneWeb: the UK Government is not selling its share," he wrote. 

The OneWeb constellation of 650 satellites was nearing completion and was due to be fully deployed this year. A series of six Soyuz rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan were planned for 2022, each carrying 36 300-pound satellites. 

OneWeb's massive constellation has been compared to the SpaceX Starlink system, which will operate at a lower orbit. OneWeb's service is targeted at commercial and government broadband users, including users in the maritime sector; SpaceX's business model is primarily oriented towards consumers. 

Roscosmos' operations appear to have become entangled in the Ukraine invasion on several fronts. Rogozin's announcement about the next OneWeb launch came shortly after claims that a hacking group had disabled a Roscosmos control center, leaving the agency with "no more control over their own spy satellites." Roscosmos denied the report, but in an interview with state media, Rogozin warned that “offlining the satellites of any country is actually a casus belli, a cause for war."