​​After 18 orbital launches, the British company OneWeb has 618 functional satellites, which are enough for the global coverage of the satellite Internet services it offers.

This happened even as 36 satellites, which were supposed to be launched by a Russian Soyuz rocket in March 2022, are still captured by the Russian Federation and stored in a hangar in Baikonur.

On March 4, 2022, a few days after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Soyuz rocket was preparing to launch 36 OneWeb satellites from Baikonur. The launch was canceled because in those days Roscosmos decided to unilaterally change the contract with OneWeb, introducing some clauses that the British company could not accept. As a result, the rocket was later used for another launch, and the satellites ended up in a hangar at Baikonur, where they are apparently stored today.

You might think that satellites that are ready to fly into space are insured, and this is generally true, and a representative of OneWeb confirmed that his company’s satellites are also insured, but the insurance does not in any way cover the situation created by Roskosmos, so the company considers them lost and she has no choice but to move on.

By March 2022, all of OneWeb’s 13 satellite launches to date have been carried out by Soyuz rockets from Baikonur, Orientale or French Guiana, but OneWeb was immediately forced to seek other partners to continue launching satellites.

Unexpectedly, help came from SpaceX, although OneWeb and Starlink can be considered, at first glance, as competing companies (even if it’s not entirely true, Starlink focuses on the domestic sector, while OneWeb works more with large companies such as Airbus). After all, it was a business for SpaceX, and the Falcon 9 is the most affordable and affordable orbital launch vehicle to date. From December 8, 2022 to March 9, 2023, dedicated to OneWeb, there were 3 Falcon 9 launches, but at the same time the British company turned to another space agency for help.

On October 22, 2022, a GSLV Mk III rocket launched 36 OneWeb satellites from the Indian Space Center’s SLP pad at Sriharikot, marking the first commercial mission of the GSLV Mk III rocket. India’s launch vehicle was designed for Indian government satellites and is in the process of being certified for manned flights as India looks to send its own crew into orbit in the coming years (future Indian astronauts were at the famous Star City near Moscow for training a few months ago).

The rocket’s additional stage was slightly modified to meet the requirements of the OneWeb satellites, and even the name of the launch vehicle was changed from GSLV Mk III (which stands for Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, Mark III) to LVM3 (since India realized that it could also use the rocket for missions in other orbits, not only in geosynchronous ones). Sunday 26th March saw the final launch of OneWeb and the last one dedicated entirely to the UK constellation as there are now enough satellites in orbit for global coverage.

How does OneWeb manage to provide full service with only 618 satellites compared to Starlink which needs several thousand? Putting them into a higher orbit: OneWeb uses an altitude of 1,200 km, which means that the OneWeb satellite serves a larger area than the Starlink satellite, which is at an altitude of about 550 km. OneWeb’s downside is higher latency: while the minimum latency for Starlink is 3.7ms, OneWeb can’t go below 8ms, which might be uncomfortably high for some applications. By comparison, geostationary telecommunications satellites orbiting the Earth at an altitude of more than 35,000 km provide (for many years) Internet connections with a latency of more than 200ms.

It remains to be seen whether the 36 satellites can be recovered. Although OneWeb currently has a functional grouping, we will see more launches with this type of satellite in the future, but not launches dedicated exclusively to OneWeb: new satellites will replace old ones, and there will always be multiple functional satellites to do so. in orbit who are waiting to take the place of the elders or who suffer from technical problems. We will see more OneWeb satellites launched by Falcon 9 rockets, but perhaps the Indian space agency is another winner in this situation: it could take advantage of the lack of a Falcon 9 alternative due to the absence of a Soyuz rocket

on the market, but also about the delay in the debut of the Ariane 6 and Vulcan rockets.

It is possible that the satellites in the Baikonur hangar will someday be used as currency between Roskosmos and ESA (or Arianespace). That’s because Arianespace uses Russian Roscosmos launchers at the European Space Center in French Guiana, and after Russia’s sudden withdrawal from the deal, the European Space Center was left with Russian equipment needed to launch Soyuz rockets, equipment that is also stored in some European hangars. And who will probably be able to return to the Russian Federation under certain conditions.

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