The future of the Antares space station resupply missions from Wallops Island remains in doubt, despite good news from Ukraine about the factory complex that designs and manufactures rocket bodies for the launches from a state-owned pad on the Eastern Shore barrier island.
The U.S. government confirmed Thursday that the complex in Dnipro, Ukraine, was “structurally intact,” despite previous unconfirmed reports that the Yuzhnoye State Design Office and Yuzhmash Machine Building had been destroyed by missile strikes when the Russian military invasion began on Feb. 24.
The complex produces the first-stage assemblies for Antares rockets to resupply the International Space Station under contracts between Northrop Grumman Corp. and NASA.
But the good news was tempered by an announcement in Russian media on Thursday that Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, no longer would allow the sale and delivery to the U.S. of the engines used in the Antares program.
“Today we have made the decision to halt the deliveries of rocket engines produced by NPO Energomash to the United States,” said Roscosmos Director Dmitry Rogozin in a television interview reported by TASS, the Russian government press agency. “Let me remind you that these deliveries had been quite intensive somewhere since the mid-1990s.”
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The Russian decision came in response to sanctions the U.S. and its allies imposed in opposition to the invasion of Ukraine. President Joe Biden said the sanctions include reductions in export of U.S. technology to Russia that he said would “degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program.”
According to a report by Reuters, Rogozin said in the television interview, “In a situation like this we can’t supply the United States with our world’s best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don’t know what.”
The ban applies to the RD-181 rocket engines used in the Antares program since 2016, two years after a rocket powered by a rebuilt Russian engine exploded moments after launch and caused $20 million in damage to the state pad next to the Atlantic Ocean.
It also applies to the RD-180 engines the United Launch Alliance uses to power the Atlas V rocket, which was used to launch the Cygnus spacecraft for Northrop Grumman resupply missions to the space station after the Antares launch failure in October, 2014.
Northrop Grumman and the ULA say they had stockpiled equipment for future launches. In a news conference before the last Antares launch from Wallops on Feb. 19, Northrop Grumman space launch program director Kurt Eberly said the company had all of the components it needs for the next to resupply missions scheduled this year.
“Best mitigation we can have is to be buying ahead,” Eberly said, according to a report by The Space Review. “Hopefully, that will tide us over until these tensions can subside and we can be back to normal operating procedure.”
Northrop Grumman, based in Fairfax County, has said little since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.
The company deferred all questions about U.S. sanctions to NASA but said “we have all the hardware needed to fulfill our NASA-contracted missions on Antares.”
John Logsdon, founder and former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said Friday, “I would characterize it as highly uncertain.”
Logsdon was pleased that the Yuzhnoye/Yuzhmash complex had not been destroyed, but he said, “Producing a complex piece of equipment, even if the factory is intact, in the middle of a combat zone is pretty dicey.”
The future of the International Space Station itself is uncertain after Rogozin blasted the U.S. sanctions on Twitter and suggested that they could “destroy our cooperation” in the program. Subsequently, Russia halted launches to the space station for Europe from French Guiana.
“So far, the perspective from NASA is that we continue to cooperate with Russians where we can, especially with the International Space Station,” Rep. Don Beyer, D-8th, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, said this week.
“At the same time, it’s hard to imagine going forward on any additional projects together.”
“It’s certainly a casualty,” Beyer said, “and there are many casualties from this invasion.”
