{"id":46133,"date":"2023-06-28T18:53:02","date_gmt":"2023-06-28T10:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/trend-or-aberration-russia-is-launching-foreign-satellites-again\/"},"modified":"2023-06-28T18:53:02","modified_gmt":"2023-06-28T10:53:02","slug":"trend-or-aberration-russia-is-launching-foreign-satellites-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/trend-or-aberration-russia-is-launching-foreign-satellites-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Trend or aberration? Russia is launching foreign satellites again"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the first time since the invasion of Ukraine essentially cut off Russia\u2019s space industry from foreign customers, a Russian rocket lifted off Tuesday and carried satellites into orbit with commercial technology from Western companies.<\/p>\n

The payloads from companies based in the United Kingdom and Luxembourg flew on a satellite owned by the United Arab Emirates, which has maintained warmer relations with Russia than Western countries. Although the payloads are small, their presence on Tuesday\u2019s launch is notable after the war in Ukraine, and resulting Western sanctions, effectively led to an embargo against putting US and European space technology on Russian rockets.<\/p>\n

UK and European Union sanctions introduced after Russia\u2019s 2022 invasion prevent exporting a wide range of space technology to Russia. Companies from the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and other nations have moved their satellites off of Russian rockets, primarily switching them to launch vehicles from SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and India.<\/p>\n

The European Space Agency terminated a partnership with Russia on Mars exploration within weeks of the Ukraine invasion.<\/p>\n

Russia launched an Angolan communications satellite last year, but that mission was part of an intergovernmental agreement. Russia continues launching US astronauts to the International Space Station through a no-funds-exchanged arrangement with NASA.<\/p>\n

The launch Tuesday began with the liftoff of a Soyuz rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, located in the far eastern part of Russia, at 7:34 am ET (11:34 UTC). The Soyuz booster and its Fregat upper stage successfully delivered a Russian civilian weather satellite into a polar orbit, then deployed 42 secondary payloads, mainly CubeSats from Russian companies and universities.<\/p>\n

There were three small foreign satellites on the Soyuz launch manifest. One was from Belarus, a staunch Russian ally, and the others were from the UAE and Malaysia.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat surprised me about the others is they both have commercial elements with ties to the West,\u201d said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, a satellite industry analytics and advisory firm.<\/p>\n

The mission of the 44-pound (20-kilogram) UAE satellite, named PHI-Demo, is to serve as a host platform for two European technology demonstration experiments. The PHI-Demo spacecraft hosts a 5G communications payload from a Luxembourg company called OQ Technology supporting data transfer and asset monitoring applications. Also on board is an experimental water-powered resistojet thruster developed by the UK company SteamJet Space Systems, which says it specializes in environmentally friendly propulsion that can provide tens of times more thrust than electric propulsion.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The UAE\u2019s PHI-Demo satellite weighed about 44 pounds (20 kilograms) at launch.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

The Dubai-based Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center, which owns and operates the PHI-Demo spacecraft, said it developed the satellite in partnership with the UAE\u2019s private space sector and research institutions. The UK\u2019s SteamJet and Luxembourg\u2019s OQ Technology secured agreements with UAE officials to place their payloads on the PHI-Demo satellite, while the Emiratis were responsible for selecting the Russian launch vehicle.<\/p>\n

Another foreign satellite from Malaysia was also on the Soyuz rocket launch Tuesday. The Malaysian CubeSat is the first spacecraft owned by a company with lofty ambitions named Angkasa-X, which calls itself the \u201cSpaceX of Asia,\u201d to provide broadband Internet coverage for the Asia-Pacific region.<\/p>\n

Angkasa-X is backed by Greenpro Capital Corp., a Nasdaq-listed Malaysian business incubator headquartered in Kuala Lumpur and registered in Nevada. Officials from the UAE, SteamJet, OQ Technology, and Malaysia\u2019s Angkasa-X did not respond to questions from Ars. <\/p>\n

\u201cAn aberration\u201d<\/h2>\n

The UAE and Malaysian satellite operators booked their rides on the Soyuz launch Tuesday through Russian intermediaries, including a Russian private company called Aerospace Capital and Glavkosmos, a subsidiary of Russia\u2019s space agency Roscosmos. A German company originally involved in brokering rides for international satellites on the Soyuz rocket backed out of the mission.<\/p>\n

Russian, UAE, and Malaysian officials did not disclose launch prices for the Soyuz flight. But it\u2019s hard to imagine Russia undercutting SpaceX\u2019s price for a small satellite to ride on one of its Falcon 9 rideshare missions without selling the Soyuz launch service below cost. A 20-kilogram satellite like the UAE\u2019s PHI-Demo mission would have cost $330,000 to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket, according to a price query tool on SpaceX\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

One manager from an international launch broker in 2021 said SpaceX\u2019s rideshare launch prices were the \u201ccheapest to date.\u201d<\/p>\n

Henry said he\u2019s not seeing any indication of broader acceptance in the commercial satellite industry of resuming launches on Russian rockets.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I suspect is that companies who have chosen to launch on Soyuz after Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine will find that this action sours interest from customers and investors across large swaths of the world, especially in Europe and the US,\u201d Henry said. \u201cThe recent Soyuz launch strikes me as more an aberration than a trend, but it\u2019s too early to say.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the first time since the invasion of Ukraine essentially cut off Russia\u2019s space industry from foreign customers, a Russian rocket lifted off Tuesday and carried satellites into orbit with commercial technology from Western companies. The payloads from companies based in the United Kingdom and Luxembourg flew on a satellite owned by the United Arab […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1608,25,8559,352,9801,1302,3884,3860],"class_list":["post-46133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-cubesats","tag-launch","tag-malaysia","tag-russia","tag-sanctions","tag-soyuz","tag-uae","tag-ukraine"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46133"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}