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

From Moscow to Plesetsk, Ukraine appears to be trying to hit infrastructure that powers Russia’s war from space.

A Russian police officer stands guard in front of a life-sized model of the Soviet-made Buran space orbiter [File: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters]

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

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.

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

The Kremlin did not confirm the casualties, but blamed the attack on the “bloody tentacles” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government.

Kyiv has not commented on the attack.

Russia’s space programme in the firing line

Chayko helped 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.

The RAF’s satellites and ground-space facilities have been used 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.

“Key factories are few, and they all are within the reach of Ukrainian missiles,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s University of Bremen, told Al Jazeera.

“These attacks may result – and certainly will – in the problems with all of Russia’s space programme, including specifically civilian and international programmes,” he said.

‘Long-range sanctions’

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.

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

“Our long-range sanctions against Russia for this war once again reached the Dubna space communications centre,” Zelenskyy said on June 30.

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

Ukrainian drones also 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, told Al Jazeera. “It’s very difficult to transfer their functions to another infrastructure” because 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 said.

Ukraine attacks ‘when there’s a fully-fuelled rocket on the launchpad’

On August 23, swarms of Ukrainian drones flew more than 1,800km (1,120 miles) to reach Russia’s northwestern Arkhangelsk region.

Some 40 drones were downed, regional authorities claimed, 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 later, Roscosmos, the state-run space corporation, reported the successful launch of a rocket with unnamed “military satellites”.

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 said.

The attempts were serious enough to be publicly reported to Putin.

“Our [Ukrainian] ‘friends’ did everything to make this launch not happen,” Dmitry Bakanov, head of the Kremlin-run Roscosmos space agency, told Putin in April.

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.

The military satellites launched from Plesetsk are part of the Rassvet (Dawn) satellite fleet designed to rival and replace Starlink satellite modems by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, Moscow claimed.

The world’s most launched 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.

The “Sputnik moment” was the US’s realisation, after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite in 1957, that the USSR had taken the lead in space technology and science.

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

The R-7 became a prototype of the Soyuz booster rockets, the world’s most launched spaceships that made 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, told this reporter in 2007 at the Baikonur spaceport, the world’s oldest in southern Kazakhstan that Russia leases.

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 said.

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 said.

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

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.

Following 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 also deepened the international isolation of its civilian space programme, with Western governments and space agencies suspending or abandoning several 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.

The same year, Berlin switched off its X-ray telescope on Spektr-RG, a Russia-German space observatory that maps clusters of galaxies and surveys the universe for black holes.

For the sake of seizing insignificant areas in eastern Ukraine, “Putin will waste the Russian space programme the way he wasted the rest of the Soviet legacy”, analyst Mitrokhin believes.

Yet Russia has not been completely cut off from international space cooperation.

Despite the collapse of some partnerships, NASA and Roscosmos have continued to work together on board the International Space Station, while Moscow has turned to China and other non-Western partners for new projects.

从莫斯科到普列谢茨克，乌克兰似乎正试图从太空打击为俄罗斯战争提供动力的基础设施。

一名俄罗斯警察站在苏联制造的暴风雪号航天飞机等比例模型前站岗。[图片：Maxim Shemetov/路透社]

乌克兰基辅——俄罗斯空天军司令亚历山大·柴科在一场爆炸中侥幸生还，而他的女婿却在爆炸中丧生。

据报道，在7月最后一周刚满55岁的查伊科于8月1日在莫斯科市中心一家高档意大利餐厅举行了一场迟到的生日派对。

列表 1/4：特朗普是否再次拉拢俄罗斯——以及原因？

列表 2/4：德国指责俄罗斯在 8 月份对莱比锡机场发动无人机袭击未遂

列表 3/4：乌克兰无人机能否关闭俄罗斯领空？这对航空公司意味着什么？

列表 4/4 “僵局”：欧盟部长们未能打破以色列和乌克兰问题上的僵局

但庆祝活动戛然而止，一名身份不明的女子携带自制炸弹试图进入餐厅。据俄罗斯方面称，她被一名保安拦下。她包里的爆炸物引爆，造成至少五人死亡。

克里姆林宫没有证实伤亡情况，但将此次袭击归咎于乌克兰总统泽连斯基政府的“血腥触角”。

基辅方面尚未对此次袭击事件发表评论。

俄罗斯太空计划首当其冲

查伊科协助领导俄罗斯干预叙利亚，并在 2022 年初指挥基辅以北的俄罗斯军队。

乌克兰指控他犯有战争罪。

5月，俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔·普京任命他为俄罗斯空军总司令，该空军负责控制俄罗斯太空计划的军事部分。

英国皇家空军的卫星和地面空间设施已被用于收集情报、导航以及支持地面部队和无人机及导弹攻击的协调。

这些设施大多位于俄罗斯西部，乌克兰新型远程无人机和导弹能够打击它们。

“关键工厂数量很少，而且都在乌克兰导弹的射程之内，”德国不来梅大学的研究员尼古拉·米特罗欣告诉半岛电视台。

他说：“这些袭击可能会——而且肯定会——给俄罗斯的整个太空计划，特别是民用和国际计划，带来问题。”

“长期制裁”

6 月下旬，乌克兰无人机袭击了位于莫斯科郊外绿树成荫、宁静祥和的杜布纳镇的巨型太空通信中心，该中心负责管理侦察卫星和处理军事数据。

这次袭击损坏了一座 32 米（105 英尺）高的卫星天线、硬件模块化复合体、中央控制台和技术建筑物。

泽连斯基6月30日表示：“我们针对俄罗斯这场战争的长期制裁再次波及到了杜布纳航天通信中心。”

俄罗斯当局称，杜布纳一栋未指明的建筑物遭到破坏，一名六个月大的婴儿死亡。

乌克兰无人机还袭击了俄罗斯西部三个较小的太空通信中心，并吞并了克里米亚。

“从建设角度来看，这些中心造价非常昂贵，而且非常耗费人力，”美国作家、俄罗斯航天计划权威专家之一阿纳托利·扎克告诉半岛电视台。“由于它们管理着固定在特定位置的地球静止轨道卫星，因此很难将它们的功能转移到其他基础设施上。”

到目前为止，还没有迹象表明卫星失去了轨道或变得无法控制，但扎克说，“幕后肯定存在严重的沟通问题”​​。

乌克兰发动袭击，“发射台上明明有一枚装满燃料的火箭”。

8月23日，大批乌克兰无人机飞行超过1800公里（1120英里），抵达俄罗斯西北部的阿尔汉格尔斯克地区。

地方当局声称约有 40 架无人机被击落，但至少有两架到达了普列谢茨克附近地区，普列谢茨克是俄罗斯的军事航天发射场，也是洲际弹道导弹和运载军用卫星的火箭的发射场。

没有造成任何损害。一天后，俄罗斯国家航天集团公司（Roscosmos）宣布成功发射了一枚搭载未命名“军用卫星”的火箭。

乌克兰发动的这次袭击——以及今年早些时候的另外两次袭击——的时机都是经过精心计算的，目的是袭击一枚刚刚加满燃料并升空准备起飞的助推火箭。

扎克说：“普列谢茨克已经遭遇了三次空袭，而且不仅仅是空袭，而是在发射台上有一枚加满燃料的火箭即将发射的时候进行的空袭。”

这些企图性质严重，已经公开报告给了普京。

“我们的（乌克兰）‘朋友’竭尽全力阻止这次发射，”克里姆林宫控制的俄罗斯航天局局长德米特里·巴卡诺夫在四月份告诉普京。

据华盛顿特区智库詹姆斯敦基金会的分析师帕维尔·卢津称，至少需要十二架无人机才能破坏普列谢茨克的发射台或火箭组装车间。

莫斯科方面声称，从普列谢茨克发射的军用卫星是“黎明”（Rassvet）卫星群的一部分，旨在与埃隆·马斯克的SpaceX公司推出的星链（Starlink）卫星调制解调器竞争并取而代之。

世界上发射次数最多的宇宙飞船

地球第一颗人造卫星“斯普特尼克1号”只有健身球那么大，里面除了一个无线电发射器和三节银锌电池之外什么也没有。

“人造卫星时刻”是指苏联在 1957 年发射第一颗人造卫星后，美国意识到苏联在空间技术和科学领域已经处于领先地位。

但“斯普特尼克1号”是由一枚改装过的R-7火箭发射升空的——R-7是世界上第一枚洲际弹道导弹，其设计目的是携带氢弹跨越大陆。同样的火箭技术，原本可以将核弹头投送到美国本土，却被重新用于将卫星送入轨道。

R-7 成为联盟号运载火箭的原型，联盟号是世界上发射次数最多的航天器，它使苏联乃至俄罗斯的发射变得常规而精确，这与美国航天飞机的发射截然不同。

“无论晴雨、雨夹雪还是下雪，都无关紧要，”美国宇航局载人航天计划副主任马克·鲍曼在 2007 年于拜科努尔航天发射场（位于哈萨克斯坦南部，是世界上最古老的航天发射场，由俄罗斯租用）告诉这位记者。

联盟号火箭的唯一生产地是位于伏尔加河畔城市萨马拉的进步火箭航天中心——8月15日，乌克兰导弹袭击了该中心。袭击引发火灾，并对其中一座设施造成了轻微损坏。

“到目前为止，我们看到萨马拉的损失并不严重，”卢津说。

他说，如果情况变得危急，俄罗斯将无法生产联盟号火箭，但现有的火箭库存仍然可以维持一年。

共产主义莫斯科从未宣传其太空计划的军事部分，而是强调其“和平探索太空”。

苏联率先将狗、一名男性和一名女性送入太空，并发射了世界上第一个空间站。1988年，其“暴风雪”号航天飞机成为第一个完成无人轨道飞行并自动着陆的航天器。

它的无人探测器在金星和火星上软着陆，并拍摄了月球背面第一张照片。

苏联太空计划的一些关键人物出生于现在的乌克兰，1991 年苏联解体后，一系列重要的设计局和制造工厂继续在那里运作。

2014 年俄罗斯吞并克里米亚以及随后俄乌关系破裂后，乌克兰航空航天设施切断了与莫斯科的长期联系，导致数十年来助推火箭、制导系统、电子设备和其他部件的供应中断。

俄罗斯入侵乌克兰也加深了其民用航天计划在国际上的孤立，西方各国政府和航天机构暂停或放弃了几个计划中的任务和合作项目。

2022 年战争爆发后，欧洲航天局终止了与俄罗斯航天局在火星探测任务上的合作，将俄罗斯制造的“卡扎乔克”着陆平台从旨在寻找火星上过去生命迹象的任务中移除。

同年，柏林关闭了 Spektr-RG 上的 X 射线望远镜。Spektr-RG 是一个俄罗斯-德国太空天文台，用于绘制星系团图并巡天寻找黑洞。

分析人士米特罗欣认为，为了夺取乌克兰东部一些微不足道的地区，“普京会像浪费苏联其他遗产一样浪费俄罗斯的太空计划”。

然而，俄罗斯并未完全被排除在国际航天合作之外。

尽管一些合作关系破裂，但美国宇航局和俄罗斯航天局仍在国际空间站上继续合作，而莫斯科则转向中国和其他非西方伙伴寻求新项目。