OneWeb Has a Ride Into Space

Not even three weeks ago, March 4, we heard that Russia's Roscosmos had halted launches for hire, stranding satellite Internet provider OneWeb with a Soyuz load of satellites in Russia and no reliable way to launch them.  

This morning, OneWeb announced a contract with SpaceX  to launch their satellites, stepping into the gap lefty by Roscosmos.  Terms of the contract haven't been released, but those probably aren't the details we want.  I may be speaking for myself, but I want to know how many launches and where they're launching from.  They say the first launch will be this year, so it's all about how fast they can prepare a payload of satellites and how fast SpaceX can respond.  

Relating to this, although I don't know if the announcement is the reason, there's this Twitter exchange that Elon Musk was part of:

With one company lifting 65 to 70% of the world's payloads into orbit, it's pretty safe to say that's the only company in the world that's likely to have some spare capacity to dedicate to an emergency like this one.  There was talk back at the start of the month that OneWeb would probably have to arrange a deal with SpaceX so the deal isn't completely out of nowhere, but remember that the two companies are competitors in the satellite ISP world.  SpaceX Starlink launches are on the company's dime, and while it's one of the ways they test their most heavily flown boosters, a little extra revenue never hurt anyone.  They're still on pace for one launch per week this year, and I'll speculate that SpaceX might add some launches for OneWeb, or replace some Starlink launches with OneWeb, or both. 

OneWeb, though, still isn't out of the woods.  The relationship between Russian and Western spaceflight programs has effectively been cut off.  That means all 6 or 7 of OneWeb’s remaining Soyuz launch contracts, each of which the company had already paid more than $50 million for, are gone.  Though the company's technicians were able to leave the country, Russia effectively seized OneWeb’s remaining Soyuz rockets and its 13th batch of operational satellites.  

That left OneWeb in an unsurprisingly precarious situation. Having already gone bankrupt once, a major delay could be financially catastrophic for the company. Normally, procuring half a dozen near-term launch contracts at the last second would be virtually impossible. Indeed, ignoring a certain US company, no other launch provider on Earth could even theoretically find or build enough capacity to launch the last third of OneWeb’s constellation without at least a one or two-year delay. Luckily for OneWeb, SpaceX does exist.

It bears mentioning that OneWeb isn't alone in being left hanging by Roscosmos.  There are satellites for the European Union as well.  The EU is in a bind because there are no more Ariane 5 cores and Ariane 6 isn't really up to production numbers, yet.  That means some of those programs may be coming to SpaceX as well.  Eric Berger from Ars Technica and on Twitter as @SciSpaceGuy notes:

Notable: Important space officials in Germany say the best course for Europe, in the near term, would be to move six stranded Galileo satellites, which had been due to fly on Soyuz, to three Falcon 9 rockets.

You can almost hear the French complaining to Germany about those missions going to SpaceX but not having anything to launch them on is a pretty hard limit.