Now Is The Time To Jettison Russian In-Space Propulsion From All Future Satellites

The Biden administration has made an ever-tightening array of economic sanctions one of the pillars of its strategy for defeating Russian aggression in Ukraine.

In addition to exacting a price from Moscow for its violation of international norms, the sanctions process potentially provides other benefits such as reducing U.S. reliance on undependable offshore sources of technology.

The Russian state space enterprise Roscosmos ironically has helped Washington to implement the sanctions regime by announcing early in the Ukraine crisis that it would cease selling rocket engines to the U.S.

Use of Russian engines to boost satellites and other payloads into orbit has been out of favor with Congress since Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, so Roscosmos may have just been accepting the inevitable when it ended sales to the U.S. shortly after Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine.

The move will have a limited impact on the domestic launch industry, because companies have been developing rockets that do not use Russian engines or (in the case of SpaceX) do not source their launch hardware outside the U.S.

However, there is another facet of the business—in-space propulsion—where Russia has a longstanding presence, especially on commercial communications satellites.

In-space propulsion typically uses electrical systems to keep satellites in their proper position, boost them from one orbit to another, or deorbit them once they have reached the end of their service life.

The most common in-space propulsion system is called a Hall-effect thruster for its American discoverer, Edwin Hall, but it was the Russians who developed the technology to a point where it became a highly reliable way of maneuvering satellites.

The Russian design bureau Fakel, headquartered in the Kaliningrad oblast between Poland and Lithuania, has pioneered development of electric propulsion for spacecraft.

The first Western use of a Russian Hall thruster was on, of all things, a U.S. National Reconnaissance Office satellite in 1998.

At the time, the Clinton administration was eager to find Western opportunities for the Russian space community that would divert engineers from their traditional military focus.

That campaign worked out well for Fakel, which developed an extensive in-space propulsion business among commercial satellite companies such as Astrium and Space Systems/Loral.

The design bureau today employs nearly a thousand workers, and its products are widely used for tasks such as shifting geostationary satellites from their initial, elliptical orbits into circular orbits that keep them above a particular place on the Earth’s surface.

Nobody disputes the need for Hall thrusters to keep spacecraft in the proper place once they are orbited; SpaceX is using the technology on its vast Starlink constellation, and NASA will use it on the Lunar Gateway that supports the return of astronauts to the Moon.

The issue is whether the U.S. and its allies should permanently ban the reliance on Fakel in-space propulsion from their military, civil and commercial satellites.

In the aftermath of this year’s Ukraine invasion, the Russians announced that they would no longer sell Fakel systems to the West and Western nations said they would no longer buy them.

But unlike in the case of booster engines, where the search for alternatives is well advanced, the moves on in-space technology are nascent, and might well be reversed if Moscow desisted in its current military campaign.

The technology is not well understood outside the space community, and Fakel is the dominant supplier of Hall thrusters; so it is not hard to imagine companies slipping back into reliance on Russian systems when current tensions cool.

Fortunately, there are other sources for systems that use electric fields to accelerate ionized propellants for in-space maneuvering, both in the U.S. and overseas.

Some of these sources, such as China, pose similar security issues in terms of their dependability and reliance on state subsidies, but at the moment the really pressing issue is implementation of economic sanctions to punish Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Permanently mandating the removal of Russian technology from commercial satellites obviously fits into the sanctions regime being pursued by the U.S. and its allies.

Removal in this case doesn’t mean modifying satellites in orbit, it means prohibiting future use of Fakel or other Russian products on spacecraft currently under development.

The national-security implications are obvious, given the U.S. Space Force’s pursuit of greater resilience at the same time allied forces are increasingly relying on commercial satcom constellations for their communications.

Although the Space Force operates several constellations of satcoms for the transmission of sensitive communications, the sheer volume of military connectivity needs dictates routine use of commercial spacecraft—many of which today use Russian in-space propulsion.

Now seems like a propitious time to begin jettisoning reliance on Russia for any such technology, since the national defense strategy identifies Moscow as a major threat for the foreseeable future.

It might make sense at this juncture to go one step further and fund the creation of a robust domestic industry for Hall thrusters capable of competing with subsidized foreign providers.

That move will require some reflection by policymakers, because we are talking here mainly about civil or commercial spacecraft, and the last thing the space community needs is to raise the cost of U.S. systems that must compete in a globalized marketplace.

However, one thing is obvious enough: the fond hopes that Washington once had for conducting business with a democratizing Russia have been dashed by the behavior of Vladimir Putin’s government, so Washington needs to minimize its dependence on any type of Russian technology.

If permanently banning the products of Fakel and other Russian space companies leads Moscow to rethink criminal attacks on its neighbors, so much the better.