THE BANKRUPTCY OF “ONEWEB”: THE START-UP WAS DEFEATED BY CORONAVIRUS

A petition on the bankruptcy was filed in a court of New York by the British company “OneWeb”. The procedure, traditional for North American justice, allows a company to protect its existing assets and reorganize the business in the least painful way.

Now the judge of the Southern District has to deal with this. While everyone, who is keen on high-tech space technologies, is mourning another victim of the coronavirus pandemic, it is worth recalling, why the bankruptcy of “OneWeb” could be a serious blow to the Russian space exploration.

“OneWeb” is one of the leading partners for Russian space programs. Over the past few years, the company has successfully launched its satellites from two spaceports – “Vostochny” and “Baikonur”.

The idea of this strat-up, successfully promoted by a former “Google” employee, Greg Wyler, was to create a group of 684 devices around the planet to provide the residents with broadband Internet access.

In this case, everyone could buy inexpensive equipment, allowing the receiving of a signal directly from a satellite. The company signed a contract for the delivery of satellites to low Earth orbit in the summer of 2015. In total, it was planned to carry out 21 launches of “Soyuz” rockets. Nine of these launches, equipped with “Fregat” booster blocks, were planned to be launched from “Baikonur”, and six more from the “Vostochny” spaceport.

As a result, only the first two satellites were launched from “Baikonur”. The “Kourou” spaceport in French Guiana has also become a platform for launching the first six satellites with the use of “Soyuz-ST” rocket. It happened on February 28, 2019. But the plans to launch more than 600 satellites by the next year, apparently, are not destined to come true now. The company managed to launch into space only 74 spacecraft. The batch of 34 vehicles, launched on March 21, was dedicated to the astronaut Leonov’s spacewalk that took place more than half a century ago.

Despite the existing competition with projects like the Amazon’s “Kuiper”, which launched its satellites for Internet broadcasting in 2018, and now is literally stepping on the heels of “SpaceX” project, “OneWeb” managed to get about $ 3.4 billion in investment.

Among the main investors, named by CEO Adrian Shtekel, there were such giants as the “Virgin Group”, “Airbus”, “SoftBank” and even the government of Rwanda. However, there was not enough investment, and it turned out to be problematic to get new ones due to the coronavirus pandemic.

As a result, the company declared bankruptcy and was forced to lay off part of its employees.

Russian counterparts of “OneWeb” are trying not to comment on the impending bankruptcy. The Russian-British enterprise “Wanweb”, a subsidiary of a British company in partnership with the Russian satellite system “Gonets”, is likely to wait for further developments. The experts are not yet able to predict, how the bankruptcy will affect the interests of “Roskosmos”.