Foreigners To Leave Baikonur Only After Ensuring Security Of OneWeb Satellites - Source

Foreign specialists will be able to leave the Baikonur cosmodrome once they have checked the safety of the British OneWeb satellites and sealed the premises where they will be stored, which may take at least one week, a source at the spaceport told Sputnik

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 04th March, 2022) Foreign specialists will be able to leave the Baikonur cosmodrome once they have checked the safety of the British OneWeb satellites and sealed the premises where they will be stored, which may take at least one week, a source at the spaceport told Sputnik.

Pre-launch work on the satellites took place at Baikonur under the contracts with the European launch services provider Arianespace and Starsem company.

"Starsem owns the facilities at Baikonur, including the finishing cells, which are certified according to Western standards, and access to them is allowed by foreigners. When the work is completed and all foreign specialists are about to leave Baikonur, the premises are sealed," the source said.

He clarified that the technological design of the satellites is classified, "thus, the foreign specialists will not leave until the demolition of the satellites is completed." The source said it would take at least a week to remove the satellites and place them in sealed storages.

"The agreements on keeping technological confidentiality are always respected, and we (Baikonur employees) are diligently fulfilling them," he added.

The launch of the OneWeb satellite with the Soyuz-2.1b rocket was scheduled for March 5, but become unlikely given the Russian military operation in Ukraine. On March 2, Director General of the state corporation Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin set the conditions for the launch, notably exhaustive legal guarantees that the UK-based company OneWeb would not use satellites for military purposes.

Another condition was that the UK government would withdraw from OneWeb's shareholding. On Thursday, the OneWeb board eventually voted to suspend all launches from the Baikonur cosmodrome, with UK State Secretary for business, Energy and Industrial strategy Kwasi Kwarteng stressing that the UK government has no intention of selling its share in OneWeb.

The OneWeb satellites are designed to build a space-based communications system providing broadband internet access to any location across the globe.