[LINK] "Putin Is Knocking Ukraine's Space Industry Out of Orbit"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg's Carol Matlack reports about the final disintegration of what remains of the unified Soviet military technology arena. This sort of thing has been having significant impacts on Russia as well, which depends heavily on Ukrainian technological exports for everything from helicopters to nuclear missiles. The immediate consequences will be good for neither country's industrial sector.

The launch of a new European space plane on Wednesday, Feb. 11, is a rare instance of good news for Ukraine's space industry, which has been increasingly at risk from the grinding conflict with Russia.

Ukraine's state-owned Yuzhnoye Design Bureau helped develop the rocket that carried the European Space Agency's new IXV experimental reentry vehicle from the Kourou launch center in French Guiana. Yuzhnoye, descended from a Soviet-era designer of ballistic missiles, has developed a business supplying rocket technology to Western partners. Its headquarters in the city of Dnepropetrovsk sits less than 150 miles from the fighting in eastern Ukraine. Still, says Oleg Ventskovsky, the company's representative in Brussels, "it's more or less business as usual."

The rest of Ukraine's space industry hasn't been so fortunate. Russia was its biggest customer, and sales have cratered. That's partly Ukraine's doing: In June, President Petro Poroshenko halted all military sales to Russia, including some dual-use missile and rocket technologies made by Ukrainian companies. A far bigger blow came earlier this month with Russia's decision to stop buying the mostly Ukrainian-made Zenit rocket, a mainstay of Russian satellite launches since Soviet times. Russia also announced it would end a joint program with Kiev that furnishes Ukrainian-built Dnepr rockets for satellite launches.

The decisions came shortly after President Vladimir Putin reorganized Russia's space program, folding what had been the national space agency into a new state corporation headed by a former auto industry executive. The former chief of the space agency had planned to continue using Ukrainian-built rockets, according to local press reports.

Russia's action also raises questions about the future of Sea Launch, a company with operations based in Long Beach, Calif., that has used Zenit rockets to launch satellites from a floating platform at sea. Sea Launch was co-founded in the 1990s by Boeing, although it is now controlled by a Russian state company, Energia, following its emergence from bankruptcy in 2010. Energia has decided to replace the Zenit with Russian-made Angara rockets on future launches, according to Russian news media reports.