Aug. 16—The drone swarms and missiles fired between Russia and Ukraine the night of August 14-15, totaling well over a thousand aircraft, destroyed more consumer-goods warehouses in the Moscow Region and in Kiev. Among the most sensitive targets in Russia, however, were a military airfield in Nizhny Novgorod, a power plant in Crimea, and factories producing dual-use machines in the Russian industrial city of Samara on the Volga River. Ukraine’s acting president Volodymyr Zelensky boasted of striking the Progress Rocket and Space Center, which makes the Soyuz series of rockets for the Russian space program. “One of the key enterprises within Roscosmos—the Progress Center, which was involved, among other things, in electronics production—was hit. Flamingo missiles were used. A good achievement. The distance from our border is about 900 kilometers.”
“The Progress center assembles the workhorse vehicle for Russian, the Soyuz-2 vehicle, as well as the newer Soyuz-5 rocket,” noted Ars Technica yesterday. “The facility also builds military satellites. Russia uses the Soyuz-2 rocket … for a variety of civil and military purposes. Notably, it is the principal rocket used for Russia’s human spacecraft launches to the International Space Station.” Indeed, from 2011 to 2020 Soyuz rockets and capsules (the latter made elsewhere) were the only available means of transporting American and other astronauts, as well as Russian cosmonauts, to the International Space Station.
Currently, Soyuz-2 rockets are deploying constellations of satellites for Rassvet, the Russian equivalent of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite communications network. Musk cut off Russian access to Starlink earlier this year.
