Sad to see roscosmos obliterate itself.
Besides that, it is hard to get a balanced view of the question because SpaceX zealots paint a rosy picture of the benevolence of the company toward what is still the only constellation that may look like a competitor to Starlink (even if it is a weak competitor).
Also, most of the news reports focus on OneWeb buying Soyuz Russian rockets. But the reality is that OneWeb bought launches from Arianespace that buys Soyuz rockets / Baikonour access through its subsidiary Starsem co-owned with Russia. So Arianespace/ArianeGroup may be on the hook for the breach of contract and possibly loss of 36 satellites.
And they are in deep trouble with the planned end of Ariane 5, no more Soyuz, Vega with no Ukranian upper stage and an uncertain progress of Ariane 6.
Disclosure: I have been involved in the OneWeb project but not a OneWeb employee.
Do you know what the contract says. Is Arianespace required to launch them? My understanding as an outsider is you buy specific launch vehicles. Do you have any idea what the legal implication of a move like that is?
Remember that monopolies are legal as long as they are fairly attained and aren't abused.
> Europe has no spare launch capacity, with all of its remaining Ariane 5 launches spoken for, and the Ariane 6 rocket is probably at least two years away from having operational capacity.
More likely than either is to put the OneWeb birds on a Falcon 9.
https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/elon-musk-says-spacex-c...
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-companies-to...
Moving to a different launch vehicle right now is horrible for them because quite simply there are not any, with exception of maybe SpaceX. That would directly fund your competitor who is already beating you.
The reason is that because of what SpaceX achieved around 2014-2015 the launch industry is moving into its next generation. However right now we are in a transition phase.
Lets go threw all rockets of any size.
- Russia Proton -> Destroyed commercially by SpaceX, unreliable, production has ended.
- Ariane 5 -> Destroyed commercially by SpaceX, sold out, production ended
- ULA Delta 4/Delta 4 Heavy -> Destroyed in government by SpaceX, sold out, production ended
- ULA Atlas 5 -> Sold out to Amazon and production ended.
- ULA Vulcan -> Not flown, engine delayed, flights booked for the next couple years at least even if it flies this year (unlikely). However, overall maybe the most likely as they actually have production capacity for the rocket itself at least. The engines are a different question.
- Japan H3 -> Delayed, booked for years, low launch rate
- Relativity Space Terran R -> NET 2025 at best (and then low launch rate for the early years)
- Rocket Lab Neutron -> NET 2025 at best (and then low launch rate for the early years)
- New Glenn -> NET mid-2023 and given engine production, real commercial launches at real, who knows. New Glenn is very low launch rate and reliant on them perfecting re-usability immediately.
- Ariane 6 -> ESA/Europe need to shift their own Soyuz launches to Ariane 6, likely no commercial availability for many years.
- India GSLV Mark III -> Very, very low launch rate and fully booked years in advanced for Indian missions.
I have less information about China but I have heard that LM5 is also basically done and they generally have a lot of their own launches. Unlikely a British/Indian rocket would use China.
SpaceX Falcon 9 of course also has a huge number of flight, likely more then all the above combined. But its at least possible that they would sell you a real block of launches that would allow you to finish your constellation in the somewhere in 2023-2024.
Around 2027 there will be lots of very large rockets looking for payloads to hope to manage their flight rates. But right now, you are out of luck.
Some people on Twitter suggest launchers like Astra, RocketLab, Firefly and so on. This is likely not commercially viable. Launching these sats 1-4 at a time would likely be way to expensive. Not to mention that it would basically overload the small launch market far more then it could handle.
So, OneWeb went bankrupt once. Now they are backed by gigantic governments and quasi-government in Britain and India. They better hope those people don't know about the Sunk-Cost fallacy.
OneWeb only real advantage was being first to market. Technologically both Starlink and Project Kuiper are on a totally different level already.
And I don't think OneWeb was doing massive R&D to compete in the tech race during their hard time. It hard enough to get production going for their current sats.
It has no debt and plenty of funding considering its relatively low burn rate, (from their latest financial report on their website).
Putting Kuiper even in the same page, is a stretch. If all goes to plan, Kuiper will have 2 prototype sats up in late 2022. That’s less than 0.1% of the full rollout. So at best Kuiper is looking at 2024-2026.
Average client does not care about which telco they use, at most they care about download speeds (which can all be very similar, accounting for having less customers, those sats with lower throughput). Fanciest tech does not mean much in this space, it’s an ISP not a laptop. The 50B revenue currently in the satcom market, is not made up of clients benchmarking very thoroughly. 32ms vs 34ms or a slightly better or worse handover will not determine where all those 50B go.
It’s still yet to be proven that the +20B Starlink or 10B Kuiper are costing is gonna be even sustainable on a 5yr basis. Given Starlink’s > ~5% satellite failure rate and its very short lifespan of 5yrs. OneWeb at ~2B total cost (thanks to clearing all debt pre Ch11) and an order of magnitude lower failure rate and double the lifespan does not sound such a bad deal.
Besides, there’s plenty of satcom business to be sold, while OneWeb will certainly get a much smaller share of the market, telcos, governments and military can pay for OneWeb’s 2B cost and plenty more in some years time.
Russia just launched Cold War v2.0 at best, if not WW3. OneWeb's value proposition just improved massively.
Ukraine had to publicly appeal to the only real competitor in the market to get Starlink. I think OneWeb is looking more valuable as a product range by the minute.
We don't know that for a fact.
I would argue the main reason was a British government was butt-hurt and wanted a 'win' in the sat space.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/03/russia-places-extrao...
