On Aug.1, Northrop Grumman’s sleek Antares rocket rose from the agricultural wetlands of eastern Virginia, propelling into orbit a cargo spacecraft headed to the International Space Station. The launch was smooth, faultless. The rocket’s first stage, assembled within the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, separated about three and a half minutes after liftoff and fell into the choppy waters of the Atlantic Ocean as planned.
The launch success was likely bittersweet for the Ukrainian engineers who built that stage . That is since the flight was the last for this sort of Antares, the 230 series, which contained Ukraine-made components, in addition to engines made in Russia.
Volodymyr Usov, a Ukraine-born space entrepreneur and former chairman of the country’s space agency, has little doubt that the collaboration with Northrop Grumman — so precious to the Ukrainians, because it opened the door for them to the West — fell victim to the war waged against them by Russia.
The top of the Antares project is just one in all the various blows Ukraine’s mighty space industry has sustained since Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
The big Yuzhnoye State Design Office and Yuzhmash Machine Constructing rocket factory in Dnipro, where the Antares first stages were assembled, have been repeatedly targeted by Russian missiles. The precise scale of injury these facilities have sustained shouldn’t be known, but Usov said the plants, giant state-run establishments from the time when Ukraine was an element of the Soviet Union, have now mostly switched to constructing military technology.
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“Dnipro is under attack almost every week, and [the Russians] goal critical infrastructure,” Usov told Space.com. “There have been several airstrikes on the [Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash] enterprises. There was some damage, however the factories are actually working pretty intensively, totally on military and defense programs.”
Before the war, the Yuzhmash and Yuzhnoye factories used to construct about 100 launch vehicles per 12 months, including Ukraine’s own medium-lift Zenit rocket that up to now had launched business payloads from the Russia-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in addition to from waterborne platforms operated by the now-defunct international company Sea Launch Alliance.
Yuzhmash and Yuzhnoye also make upper stages for the European lightweight Vega and Vega C rockets. But Usov says that, similar to Antares, that cooperation, too, is nearing its end. The loss of those contracts will hurt Ukraine, which has been looking for to create an area sector independent of its former hegemon-turned-archenemy, Russia. The Italian firm Avio, the manufacturer of the Vega rocket, has not yet confirmed whether or not it would discontinue using the Ukrainian upper-stage technology, but hinted within the wake of Russia’s invasion that it could be in search of a Europe-made substitute. Usov doesn’t welcome the move, although he understands that Ukraine has turn out to be a high-risk business partner, through no fault of its own.
“Ukraine receives plenty of [military] support, but when you have a look at our collaborations in space, it’s mostly all gone now,” Usov said. “It’s comprehensible. Our partners know that, due to war, there may be risk to the technology, and due to this fact to their schedules and their clients. No person desires to take that risk.”
Some startups, including Usov’s own Kurs Orbital and the U.K.-headquartered rocket firm Skyrora, still keep their research and development facilities in Ukraine running, although their essential operations are based in Europe. The larger projects, nonetheless, have mostly ended. U.S. rocket company Firefly, which only six years ago opened a significant research and development center in Dnipro, has withdrawn from the country, said Usov. With these partnerships gone, Ukraine’s army of engineers and space experts shouldn’t be only out of labor, but additionally, once more, isolated from the world, a bitter reminder of the many years spent behind the Iron Curtain.
“Frankly, speaking, I see more damage [to the Ukrainian space industry] from those collaborations which will not be here anymore than from direct airstrikes from the Russian army,” said Usov. “There are some startups, after all, involving small teams of young engineers that is not enough to substitute the massive programs where hundreds of space professionals were involved.”
Usov used to have daring ambitions for Ukraine’s space sector. During his 2020 tenure as chairman of the State Space Agency of Ukraine, he worked to put a foundation for a more open and commercially driven industry that will replace the tightly state-controlled ways of doing things inherited from the Soviet era. Ukraine’s heritage in aerospace is undoubtedly world-class. In actual fact, Sergey Korolev, the mastermind behind the Soviet Union’s Sixties successes within the space race, was born and raised in Ukraine. Before the Russian invasion, the state-owned corporations run by the Ukrainian space agency employed 16,000 people, nearly as many as NASA does.
But despite Ukraine’s proven track record in space technology development, the door to the West hasn’t been particularly open for the previous Soviet republic. Unlike its western neighbors Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, which before 1989 were a part of the Eastern Bloc but not the Soviet Union, Ukraine is nowhere near joining either the European Union or the European Space Agency (ESA). (It wasn’t near joining even before the Russian invasion, to be clear.)
To maintain Ukraine’s door to the West at the least ajar, Usov and plenty of other space entrepreneurs have arrange Europe-based offices for his or her firms, through which they will reach ESA’s funding and support and proceed constructing those precious international relationships.
Usov’s Kurs Orbital, which is developing a rendezvous and docking system for future in-orbit refueling and space debris removal missions, has arrange a base in Torino, Italy, where it now develops its technology with support from the local ESA Business and Incubation Center.
“We still have our R&D team in Ukraine, in Kyiv, and we’ve got our team here in Torino, in Italy,” Usov explained. “The corporate is Italian and Ukrainian, with engineers and space professionals on either side.”
When the war first began, Usov hoped for a quick victory and didn’t intend to go away his hometown of Odessa, a historical seaside resort once known for beautiful beaches and a central core protected by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). But as months dragged on and Russian missiles kept raining on the town, destroying homes and turning the historic town center into rubble, he began working on relocating to Italy.
“You go outside your home and also you see a rocket flying on top of your home,” Usov said, describing on a regular basis life near the war zone. “The one thing you are pondering in that moment is, ‘Please don’t fall on my house.’ That is a terrible thing to think. But that is the truth. After which it hits one other constructing. And at first, you’re feeling relief and you then start feeling the pain for those people who find themselves affected by that. And that is happening daily.”
For adult men younger than 60, getting out of the war-torn country shouldn’t be exactly easy. But there are exceptions that the expert and educated can use to flee and establish a brand new life within the West. Although Usov is aware of the abyss that opens between those that leave and people who stay, the entrepreneur doesn’t see himself as having abandoned Ukraine. The country’s post-war recovery and its future direction will, to a terrific degree, rely on its ability to shut the gap created by the years of being cut off from the world, he thinks. And that could be a difficult task.
“At once, if you ought to cross the border, you should do all of the paperwork and should be supported by some programs you might be participating in,” Usov said. “But this inability to go away the country — that can be one other limitation that may hit businesses in the long run. You may’t go to fulfill your potential clients, you may’t take part in international conferences, and it would remain so for years.”
In the primary weeks after the invasion, Ukraine stunned the world with its resilience and gritty defense. Contrary to expectations, the considerably larger Russia did not take over Kyiv in mere days, as Russian leadership had predicted. However the initial optimism of Usov and most of his compatriots is generally gone now. The top of the war shouldn’t be in sight, and equally distant are the dreams of a Ukraine integrated into the western community together with its space sector. How open the door can be when the conflict ends will determine the longer term of that once-mighty space sector that’s now teetering on the brink.
“If Europe and the U.S. are able to support us, it is not about giving only grants and money,” said Usov. “It’s about integrating Ukraine into their supply chains, trusting Ukraine, because Ukraine can deliver, and that can be far more helpful within the long-term perspective.”