Over the past ten years, Ukraine’s rocket and space specialists have launched 65 launch vehicles and put 123 satellites into orbit, Stanislav Koniukhov, Pivdenne design bureau’s general designer, told a Dnipropetrovsk press conference on April 12 in connection with International Day of Space Science. In his words, this demonstrates serious achievements of Ukraine in space exploration, second only to those of the US and Russia. The jubilee year of the Ukrainian rocket industry and space science has been marked with a number of outstanding events, Mr. Koniukhov said. Among them first of all was the signing of an agreement on space cooperation between Brazil and Ukraine which envisages early launchings of satellites by means of the Tsyklon-4 booster rocket from the Brazilian Alcantara equatorial launch site. An equally fundamental breakthrough was the Ukrainian victory in a tender to develop and manufacture the first Egyptian remote sensing satellite, where our rocket men outdid their rivals from France, Britain, Italy, Russia, and South Korea. According to Mr. Koniukhov, Ukrainian designers managed to win thanks to their forty years of experience, competitive prices for products, as well as the available buffer stock, that is, R&D on a similar-class satellite funded by this country’s innovation foundation. It is planned to launch the Egyptian satellite in 2004 by the converted Dnipro vehicle derived from the SS-18 strategic missile.
Touching on this subject, the Pivdenne general designer could not help noting another portentous event, destruction of the last Ukraine-based SS-24 strategic missile last February at the Pavlohrad Mechanical Plant. “Now we are not only a nuclear-free but also a power free from military missiles,” Mr. Koniukhov concluded, pointing out gloomy prospects for the now jobless Pavlohrad rocket men. “Yet, we are full of optimism. The Pivdenne design bureau is well and alive.” The Dnipropetrovsk designers are now working on the Mayak launch vehicle as part of Ukraine’s new space program.
Still, Pivdenne thinks that participation in the Sea Launch international space project is its main achievement in the years of independence. Mr. Koniukhov confessed he recalls with special feeling March 29, 1999, the date when the first Zenit-3SL rocket was launched from a Pacific floating platform. Ukraine thus managed not only to build its rocket and space image but also to raise funds for this industry. Meanwhile, just a couple of years later, the Zenit could encounter a rival, the more powerful Boeing Delta-4 launch vehicle. As soon as in five years, a similar rocket can be presented at the international space market by China. “We have already set up in conjunction with Sea Launch and Boeing a joint venture in order to keep promising projects in one place and regulate this market from within,” the Pivdenne general designer added. For the time being, Ukraine draws a $100 million annual profit from commercial space flights.
Mr. Koniukhov also expects considerable profit from creating the first Ukrainian telecommunications satellite. The cost of this project, $140 million, “is neither tremendous nor small for Ukraine.” Nevertheless, taking into account that the Ukrainians paid $9 million last year to rent channels in foreign linkup satellites, will pay $18 million next year, and as much as $68 million in 2005, the expenditures for this kind of satellite would pay their way within five years. This idea, the general designer says, has already been supported by the State Telecommunications Committee and managers of some television channels. The Ministry of Defense is also likely to offer support.
It is interesting that the Dnipropetrovsk designers, who once developed a never-used piloted lunar landing module and the Soviet space shuttle, are still working on long-term projects. One of these looks very lucrative for Ukraine, which is in no position to build a launch site of its own. It is the project of the so-called airborne launch, such that a rocket is launched to outer space from an aircraft. “Our country has the world’s most powerful aircraft, AN-124 Ruslan, which can deliver a sixty or seventy ton satellite carrying rocket to an altitude of 12 kilometers,” Mr. Koniukhov noted. The only problem lies, according to experts, in the technical aspects of the launch itself, i.e., parachuting the rocket-carrying container and firing the rocket in the air. Moreover, Ukraine also has solid fuel rockets, which the airplane can not only lift but also bring them back in case of a malfunction.
Nor have the Dnipropetrovsk designers dropped the idea of a reusable shuttle. For the time being, Mr. Koniukhov disclosed, the Pivdenne Design Bureau has recently opened a small office in Brussels in order “to get in touch with European and French space agencies” which show interest in and are capable of participating in long-term projects.
Yet, Pivdenne today is also seizing every opportunity to earn money on the ground: it designs low-entrance trolley buses catering to the disabled, small harvesters, and wind-operated water desalinators for farmers. Quite recently, late last year, some 500-kilowatt wind power plants were sent to Russia to electrify Chukotka. Province Governor Roman Abramovych, once a notorious oligarch, decided to conduct an experiment in the Far North. He preferred Ukrainian windmills to Western ones because they can operate even in a 60-degree frost. Word has it that if everything goes smoothly, the so-called boss of Chukotka will offer a large, almost cosmic, contract.
INCIDENTALLY
Independent Ukraine has inherited from the Soviet Union almost a third of its space-related industrial potential. Today, the space industry of Ukraine is one of the key sectors of the nation’s economy. It comprises over thirty industrial enterprises, design bureaus and research-and-development institutions, among them the famous Dnipropetrovsk-based Pivdenne Design Bureau and the Pivdenny Mechanical Engineering Plant, the Kharkiv-based Komunar and Khartron, the Kyiv-based radio plant, and Kyivprylad, the Chernihiv-based Chesara plant, and the Yevpatoriya-based control and space communications test center.
Three foreign launch sites – Baikonur, Plesetsk, and Sea Launch – operate five Ukrainian space rocket systems: Tsyklon-2, Tsyklon- 3, Zenit-2, Zenit-3SL, and Dnipro. Over the past decade, Ukrainian booster rockets have been launched 65 times and have put into orbit 123, including nine domestically developed and produced, spacecraft. A new series of Ukrainian launch vehicles is under development. Ukraine’s space businesses are taking part in fifty international commercial projects, the most important of them being Sea Launch, Dnipro, and Tsyklon-4.
Leonid Kadeniuk, Hero of Ukraine, assistant to the President of Ukraine on aviation and space exploration, and the first Ukrainian cosmonaut, says, “There is work, there are orders, very serious contracts, and international agreements signed with other countries, such as Russia, the US, and Brazil.”
Asked by Interfax-Ukraine if there will ever be a second Ukrainian cosmonaut, Mr. Kadeniuk said, “There will be a second and third and even a team of cosmonauts. But, unfortunately, the main problem is lack of funds. All other problems derive from this one.” According to Mr. Kadeniuk, about UAH 70 million ($13 million) were allocated for national space science in 2001 and “a little more” in 2002. He pointed out at the same time that the US had allocated last year about $13 billion for astronautics, a thousand times more.
The nation’s first cosmonaut reiterated that the Ukrainian space industry was now facing the task of building a research module which must dock in 2003 with the international space station now being assembled in orbit. However, the solution to this problem “has been in suspended animation for an indefinite time” due to severe underfunding. “If the module were built, there would be a need for a team of cosmonauts,” he said.
Mr. Kadeniuk also announced he was going to stay out of any parties in parliament but simultaneously planned to join the For a United Ukraine fraction on whose ticket he ran.
