International Technology : Russia Rockets Rising : Moscow wants its share of a booming market.

MOSCOW —  Watch out, Arianespace. Take heed, McDonnell Douglas.

With a quiet crack, the $2-billion-a-year market in launching Western satellites is opening to admit the Russian interloper who has been hammering for years at its gates.

Amid exorbitant pastries and a press of Russian reporters, space officials signed a historic contract in late April for the first commercial launch of a Western-built satellite by a Russian rocket.

The price tag, $36 million plus unspecified added expenses, was enough to strike fear in the French dominator of the satellite launch market, Arianespace, and several American competitors. Similar launches in the West normally cost at least $60 million.

If all goes as planned and a Russian Proton rocket blasts off in 1995 with a satellite for Inmarsat, the 67-country consortium that puts up satellites for mobile communications, it could mark the start of a small Russian revolution in the burgeoning sphere of global space services.

“When that happens, some industry in the West is not going to like it,” said Olof Lundberg, the director general of London-based Inmarsat. “There’s one more player to join the market.

“In the long run, I don’t think Russian space industry will dominate the market,” he said, “but it has the potential to play an important role.”

If, that is, it can win several battles. These involve politics, technology and logistics.

The first battle is a political one.

At least four times in the past, Russian space firms have been on the verge of signing contracts similar to the Inmarsat deal, but they found themselves stymied when it came to gaining U.S. permission for export of the satellite components.

As Yuri Milov, deputy director of the Russian Space Agency sees it, his competitors are making awfully clever use of leftover Cold War restrictions on technology transfer.

“Arianespace and American firms see us not as political opponents but as commercial competitors who do something better and cheaper,” Milov said. Yet, they benefit from political roadblocks that technically remain even after President Clinton promised Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin at their latest summit in Vancouver to help remove them.

Because all Western satellites contain American components, the United States has virtual veto power over all launches, and it continues to adhere to Cold War-era bans on exporting high technology to the republics of the former Soviet Union.

The Inmarsat deal is the first to have gained all the American licenses needed to export the satellite, officials said, but it received only a one-time permission, cleared by then-President George Bush. A landmark deal between Russian space scientists and Motorola to launch 21 low-station communications satellites in 1996 is still waiting for final permission from the U.S. government. As a result, to Russians, it looks like the U.S. government is intentionally dragging its feet to keep Moscow from snatching some of the launch market from American companies.

“Strangely enough,” the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta wrote recently, “the nations which have been tirelessly making assurances as to their favorable view of our reform efforts, which have long been promising massive financial aid . . . and constantly sending us humanitarian aid--these very nations are going out of their way to prevent us earning money where we can do so.”

Russian space officials emphasize that they are not out to seize the market for Western satellite launches. They just want a chunk of it.

“There is enough for everyone,” said Dmitri Poluhin, director of the Salyut design bureau that signed the deal with Inmarsat. He argued that Ariane has applications for 39 satellites a year but can launch only 10, so customers sometimes have long waits.

“We, too, can only put up between 10 and 13 satellites a year,” Poluhin said. “They take painstaking preparation. So if no one gets greedy, there’s enough for everyone.”

Russian officials particularly stressed that the American launch firms--Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics--generally use smaller rockets than Russia’s Proton and depend largely on defense contracts, so Russian launchers would not directly compete with them. Since the 1986 Challenger explosion, Ariane has reported making about 60% of the space launches.

Added to their sales pitch is the argument that Russia must make a go of its commercial satellite launches if it wants to keep its entire space program, once a showpiece of Soviet science, afloat. Russian Space Agency Director Yuri Koptev said recently that the agency hopes to earn between $200 million and $300 mil- lion in commercial ventures in coming months, but it is also asking for tens of mil lions in Russian government support that may not come through. About 30,000 employees left the space program’s production sector and 40,000 left design bureaus in 1992, he said.

The Clinton Administration is clearly caught in a bind.

On the one hand, it does indeed look hypocritical to block a Russian industry with the potential to make big money. On the other hand, Cold War nerves remain, and American industry comes first.

Vice President Al Gore said last year that he saw a direct danger to the U.S. space industry from foreign competition, warning that it was threatened by “predatory pricing” and on an international “hit list.”

Also last year, America imposed limited sanctions against the Russian and Indian space agencies because it objected to Russia’s agreement to sell rocket technology to India that U.S. officials feared could be used for missiles rather than space.

An announcement this past winter that Russia planned to revamp ballistic missiles to launch satellites for South Africa also raised hackles in Washington. And although Russian officials say they want only a piece of the market, the figures are intimidating.

Koptev himself has said that pound for pound, launching a payload to low-Earth orbit with a Russian spacecraft is five times cheaper than with an American one.

The technical advantages of using a Russian satellite launcher remain to be proven, however.

That is Moscow’s second main battle in its fight for space customers, and here its Inmarsat launch will prove a key test.

“With the Proton, we have to learn a new way of doing business and a new way of launching satellites,” Lundberg of Inmarsat said. “For us, it’s an experiment.”

The Russian satellite launch method differs from the Western technique in that the satellites remain attached to the Proton’s fourth stage, which is later reignited to boost the satellite into final orbit.

Western satellites separate from the launch vehicles soon after leaving Earth’s atmosphere; then a built-in motor gives them a boost of 6,000 feet per second to get into orbit. In a more critical difference, Russian rockets do not spin as they coast along their transfer orbit in preparation for satellite separation. Western satellites, including the Inmarsat ones, are built to be released spinning from their rocket booster. According to Inmarsat, Proton’s lack of spin creates the danger that the satellite will overheat on one side and freeze on the other, so the company has asked Russian engineers to work out a way to rotate the rocket during the 5 1/2 hours it travels from perigee to apogee.

Milov of the Russian Space Agency argued, however, that Proton’s technical differences also provide an advantage. Because it takes a satellite right up to the geostationary orbit needed for telecommunications, rather than releasing it in a transfer orbit and letting it motor itself farther, the satellite can carry pure payload instead of devoting some of its mass to fuel and a motor, he said.

To safeguard against failure, Inmarsat is launching only one of the four satellites of its new network on a Proton. Two others will take off on an American Atlas rocket and one on an Ariane booster.

Russia faces a third challenge to make its satellite launching viable--the struggle for a launch pad.

When the Soviet Union broke up, Baikonur, Russia’s equivalent of Cape Canaveral, ended up in the territory of the newly independent Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan officials, as the landlords of the Baikonur site, have been driving very hard bargains with Russian space officials for the leasing of the launching facilities there.

Poluhin assured reporters that Kazakhstan “welcomes the Inmarsat launch.” However, Lundberg acknowledged “the risk we take in terms of possible delays” by using Baikonur as the launch site.

Russia has another space center in the far north at Plesetsk, but that site has no launching facilities for Protons.

For all its obstacles, Russia is ahead of the pack of newcomers to the satellite launch business.

Israel, Brazil, China, Japan and others have been working on developing satellite launchers--China has even begun using its Long March rocket--but Russia has been throwing up satellites at a rapid rate.

Russia also has a landmark deal with Lockheed, the Calabasas-based defense giant, to market Proton worldwide.

Russian scientists, meanwhile, are working on ways to use the propulsion systems from nuclear missiles--SS-25s, SS-18s and SS-19s--as satellite launchers.

“We are 10 years late in entering the international space market,” said Koptev, the space agency’s director. “It has already been divided up. But we believe it would only be fair for Russia still to get its share.”