Ukraine takes the war to Russia’s space programme in tactical shift

Kyiv, Ukraine – Russian Aerospace Forces (RAF) chief Aleksandr Chayko barely survived a blast that killed his son-in-law.

Key points

• On August 23, swarms of Ukrainian drones flew more than 1, 800km (1, 120 miles) to reach Russia's northwestern Arkhangelsk region.
• Chayko supported lead Russia's intervention in Syria and commanded Russian forces north of Kyiv in early 2022.
• "Key factories are few, and they all are within the reach of Ukrainian missiles, " Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany's University of Bremen, informed Al Jazeera.
• "Our long-range sanctions against Russia for this war once again reached the Dubna space communications centre, " Zelenskyy remarked on June 30.
• "Our 'friends' did everything to make this launch not happen, " Dmitry Bakanov, head of the Kremlin-run Roscosmos space agency, informed Putin in April.

Chayko, who turned 55 in the last week of July, was reportedly having a belated birthday party on August 1 at a high-end Italian restaurant in central Moscow.

As an ‌unidentified woman carrying a homemade bomb tried to enter the restaurant, but the celebration was cut short. She was halted by a security ‌guard, according to Russia. The explosive in her bag detonated, killing at least five individuals.

Notably, the Kremlin did not confirm the casualties, but blamed the attack on the "bloody tentacles" of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's administration. Kyiv has not commented on the attack. Russia's space programme in the firing line.

Chayko supported lead Russia's intervention in Syria and commanded Russian forces north of Kyiv in early 2022. Ukraine has accused him of war crimes.

In May, President Vladimir Putin appointed him commander-in-chief of the RAF that controls the military component of Russia's space programme.

For context, the RAF's satellites and ground-space facilities have been applied for gathering intelligence, navigation, and supporting the coordination of ground troops and drone and missile attacks.

These facilities are located mostly in western Russia, and new Ukrainian long-range drones and missiles are capable of striking them.

"These attacks may result – and certainly will – in the problems with all of Russia's space programme, including specifically civilian and international programmes, " he remarked.

In late June, Ukrainian drones hit the giant space communications centre in the leafy, tranquil town of Dubna outside Moscow that managed reconnaissance satellites and processed military data.

In practice, the strike damaged a 32-metre (105-foot) satellite antenna, hardware modular complexes, central control consoles and technical buildings.

Russian authorities remarked an unspecified building in Dubna was damaged and a six-month-old baby died.

Ukrainian drones additionally struck three smaller space communication centres in western Russia and annexed Crimea.

"These centres are very expensive, very labour-consuming from the viewpoint of construction, " Anatoly Zak, a United States-based author and one of the foremost experts on the Russian space programme, informed Al Jazeera. "It's very difficult to transfer their functions to another infrastructure" since they manage geostationary satellites "tied" to a certain location.

So far, there have been no signs that the satellites lost orbit or became unmanageable, but "behind the scenes there are for sure serious communication problems", Zak remarked. Ukraine attacks 'when there's a fully-fuelled rocket on the launchpad'.

Some 40 drones were downed, regional authorities asserted, but at least two reached the area near Plesetsk, Russia's military cosmodrome, or spaceport, and launchpad for intercontinental ballistic missiles and rockets carrying military satellites.

No harm was done. A day afterwards, Roscosmos, the state-run space corporation, noted the successful launch of a rocket with unnamed "military satellites".

In practice, the timing of the Ukrainian attack – along with two more strikes earlier this year – was calculated to strike a booster rocket that had just been fuelled and lifted for takeoff.

"There have been three attempts to air-raid Plesetsk, and not just air-raid, but air-raid at the moment when there's a fully-fuelled rocket on the launchpad that is about to start, " Zak remarked. The attempts were serious enough to be publicly documented to Putin.

At least a dozen drones are necessary to damage Plesetsk's launch table or rocket assembly shop, according to Pavel Luzin, an analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Notably, the military satellites introduced from Plesetsk are part of the Rassvet (Dawn) satellite fleet designed to rival and replace Starlink satellite modems by Elon Musk's SpaceX business, Moscow asserted. The world's most introduced spaceship.

Sputnik 1, the Earth's first artificial satellite, was the size of a fitness ball, and had nothing but a radio transmitter and three silver-zinc batteries inside.

After the Soviet Union introduced the first satellite in 1957, that the USSR had taken the lead in space technology and science, the "Sputnik moment" was the US's realisation.

But Sputnik 1 was introduced on a modified R-7 – the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, designed to carry a hydrogen bomb throughout continents. The same rocket technology that could deliver a nuclear warhead into the US had been repurposed to put a satellite into orbit.

In practice, the R-7 became a prototype of the Soyuz booster rockets, the world's most introduced spaceships that produced Soviet and then Russian launches routine and precise, unlike US launches of space shuttles.

"Rain or shine or sleet or snow don't matter, " Mark Bowman, deputy director of NASA's human spaceflight programme, informed this reporter in 2007 at the Baikonur spaceport, the world's oldest in southern Kazakhstan that Russia leases.

For context, the only place where the Soyuz rockets are produced is the Progress Rocket and Space Centre in the Volga River city of Samara – and Ukrainian missiles struck it on August 15. The attack ignited a fire and slightly damaged one of the facilities.

"So far, we see that the damage in Samara wasn't critical, " Luzin remarked.

If it becomes critical, Russia would be unable to manufacture the Soyuz rockets, but the existing stash of rockets would still last a year, he remarked.

Communist Moscow never advertised the military component of its space programme, emphasising its "peaceful exploration of space".

For context, the USSR was first to send a dog, a man and a woman into space, and to launch the world's first space station. In 1988, its Buran space shuttle became the first to complete an unmanned orbital flight and land automatically.

Its unmanned probes soft-landed on Venus and Mars and took the first photos of the moon's dark side.

Some key figures of the Soviet space programmes were born in what is now Ukraine, and a string of crucial design bureaus and manufacturing facilities kept working there after the 1991 Soviet collapse.

After Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and the subsequent breakdown in Russian-Ukrainian relations, Ukrainian aerospace facilities severed their longstanding ties with Moscow, disrupting decades-old supplies of booster rockets, guidance systems, electronics and other components.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine additionally deepened the international isolation of its civilian space programme, with Western governments and space agencies suspending or abandoning a number of planned missions and partnerships.

After the war began in 2022, the European Space Agency terminated its cooperation with Roscosmos on ExoMars, removing the Russian-built Kazachok landing platform from the mission designed to search for signs of past life on Mars.

Taken together, the developments around ukraine takes the war to Russia's space programme in tactical shift point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.