Left without orders, Yuzhmash is close to death

Moscow - Kiev, October 22 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - Roscosmos will not supply Ukraine with the RD-171M engine for the Zenit rocket, intended to launch into orbit the first Ukrainian geostationary broadcast satellite "Lybid" (the launch was scheduled for mid-2014 ). The management of Dnepropetrovsk Yuzhmash, where Zenits are made, over the past 5 months has been trying to get the Russian side to supply the engine without payment. Yuzhmash, left without orders, from where people are fleeing, is close to death, they write "News".

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The engine for Zenit still remains on the balance sheet of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Center for Operation of Ground-Based Space Infrastructure (TSENKI), where Izvestia was informed that no actions usually preceding the export delivery of such equipment are currently being carried out. The chances that Yuzhmash will make the payment and buy the engine are extremely low: the enterprise is in dire straits, this is written not only in the Ukrainian media, but also on the website of Yuzhmash itself.

“Yuzhmash is experiencing a deep financial crisis, the main factor of which is a collapse in production volumes,” says a message from the company’s marketing communications department, published on the website on October 10. And according to the Ukrainian economic publication Capital, in recent months, about 700 specialists have left Yuzhmash due to lack of both salary and work.

“The current crisis is not irreversible, but the situation is close to the point of no return,” Yuzhmash marketers frank on the corporate website.

Roscosmos agrees with this assessment. “We believe that there is no point in supplying them with equipment for Zenit before making payments, because we will not see money from them, the company is essentially bankrupt,” explained an informed source at the space agency.

Let us recall that Roscosmos last year stopped purchasing Zenit rockets for launches within the Federal Space Program; this year RSC Energia decided to freeze the Sea Launch project, which involved launching satellites by Zenit from a floating sea platform. As a result, no one needed the Zenit family of carriers, and Yuzhmash did not have the funds to produce, perhaps, the last rocket to launch the Ukrainian satellite. The Lybid satellite itself, according to a representative of Roscosmos, is already ready and is in storage at the Reshetnev ISS OJSC. The Ukrainian state budget spent $254 million on its creation.

According to Izvestia’s interlocutor in Roscosmos, soon those employees of Yuzhmash who are involved in the program for modifying the R-36M UTTH strategic missile systems (according to the START-1 treaty - RS-20B, according to the NATO classification - SS-18 Satan mod 4). In a modified version for space launches, the rocket is called “Dnepr” and is now used to launch small spacecraft into orbit by the Russian-Ukrainian-Kazakh company Kosmotras.

“Now the Russian side has raised the question of changing the economics of the project in such a way that it would be more beneficial to the Russian side,” says an interlocutor at Roscosmos. — Whether these conditions will suit the Ukrainian partners is still unclear, but if we don’t agree, the Dnepr program will be completed.