On September 6, the director of the European Space Agency (ESA), Josef Aschbacher, said that Europe had severed all ties with the Russian space industry and saw no reason to restore them; ESA has now announced the cancellation of all planned launches.
As our Association has already reported many times, since 2014, the Russian invaders have consistently tried to include the equipment of the National Space Agency of Ukraine, such as the RT-70 radio telescope, which was criminally captured in Crimea, in joint space projects with the Europeans.
In 2021, we sent to the space agencies of civilized countries, including ESA, evidence of criminal attempts to use this equipment, in particular, intended for the telemetry of spacecraft in deep space, for the Russian-German project “Spectrum-X-ray-Gamma” in the field of development of “global navigation systems” of a new generation, which the Kremlin planned to use to develop its own missile weapons.
In March 2022, the ESA suspended and on July 12 terminated the implementation of this program precisely in connection with Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine as part of Russian aggression, which was described in our appeals to this structure. Later, in August of this year, we predicted that the ESA would completely stop cooperation with “Roscosmos”, whose officials will now obviously be busy exclusively with staging propaganda videos in the occupied Crimea against the background of the criminal property of space communications taken from Ukraine.
It should be noted that Russian propaganda is now trying to link the position of the ESA and the cancellation of the launch of “OneWeb” satellites on a Russian rocket, which was allegedly planned with the mediation of the ESA. It claims that allegedly “as a result of 36 satellites remaining in Kazakhstan, OneWeb’s losses will amount to $229 million”.
In fact, shortly after the start of large-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine, “Roscosmos” itself demanded that the British government remove its representative from the company’s board of directors as a condition for continued cooperation with “OneWeb”.
After London’s refusal, “Roscosmos” itself removed the “Soyuz” rocket with the 36 mentioned satellites from the launch, canceled the launch scheduled for March 4, and the satellites themselves are still instorage at the cosmodrome. In total, the company paid for six launches of Russian missiles toreplenish the orbital group within the framework of the contract, the money for them has not yet beenreturned by the aggressor.
Because of this, as early as March 2022, the international corporation “OneWeb” itself announced the conclusion of an agreement on the launch of satellites with the American corporation “SpaceX”, and according to “Bloomberg”, confirmed contracts for the launch of devices exceed 300 million dollars. Thus, all the losses of “OneWeb” were caused precisely because of the illegal actions of “Roscosmos”, and the current sanctions from the ESA no longer affect them.
