Ukraine’s Space Industry and its Allies Integrate Lessons from 3 Years of Vicious War

Home-assembled made-in-China $300 Mavic drones laden with grenades have become the symbol of Ukraine’s ingenious fight to maintain independence from its eastern neighbor. The bloody war, which has to-date killed over 12,000 Ukrainian civilians and at least 43,000 soldiers, has produced impressive advances in drone warfare and spawned a home-grown innovation ecosystem that has positioned Ukraine as a potential disruptor of the global defense sector.

Home-assembled made-in-China $300 Mavic drones laden with grenades have become the symbol of Ukraine’s ingenious fight to maintain independence from its eastern neighbor. The bloody war, which has to-date killed over 12,000 Ukrainian civilians and at least 43,000 soldiers, has produced impressive advances in drone warfare and spawned a home-grown innovation ecosystem that has positioned Ukraine as a potential disruptor of the global defense sector.

The Ukrainian war has also been the first major conflict observed nearly in real time from space. In that domain, however, Ukraine needed much more support from its western allies. Far away from the battlefields of Donbas, in comfortable offices in western Europe and North America, Earth Observation (EO) companies supplying Ukraine’s forces with intelligence are finding themselves under constant pressure to deliver more, better and faster to help the post-Soviet republic keep up with Russia’s advances.

“It challenges us a lot on a few different levels,” Peter Wilczynski, chief product officer at Maxar Technologies, tells Via Satellite. “It shifted our mission from a company founded to map the world to one mapping a battle space that is changing very rapidly. We needed to be able to push our images to where change is happening and getting images down more quickly.”

With a Little Help

Maxar was among the companies whose images first alerted the world to the alarming accumulation of Russian troops and military technology along Ukraine’s eastern borders in the weeks leading up to the February 2022 invasion.

Maxar’s satellites showed the world in near real time as a 40-mile-long convoy of Russian tanks and armored vehicles drew close to Ukraine’s capital Kyiv just a few days after the invasion. Ever since, companies like Maxar have been providing priceless insights to Ukraine’s defense forces who otherwise would have been blind to the enemy’s movements.

Despite its rich heritage of Soviet-era rocketry, Ukraine has launched only two Earth observing satellites since its liberation from the USSR in 1991 — the second of these satellites, the 170-kilogram Sich-2-30, reached space just a few weeks before the invasion.

Russia on the contrary, had an estimated 16 military reconnaissance satellites in space at the onset of the war and is believed to have launched further spacecraft since.

Through the cooperation with western companies, Ukraine has gained access to hundreds of EO satellites. The constant stream of data the commanders benefit from includes high-resolution views in visible light as well as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery that reveals the situation on the ground in darkness and through the cloud.

“We've evolved our capabilities significantly through our support of Ukrainian partners,” John Cartwright, head of data product at SAR satellite company Iceye, tells Via Satellite. “The requirements at the beginning of the war have evolved significantly relative to where we are today. We have developed new products and new capabilities in response to their feedback. We had to develop a capability to deliver imagery very rapidly so that they can use it for tactical decisions.”

In March last year, Iceye released a product called Dwell, which detects military equipment hidden under tree canopy. The product, Cartwright says, was developed to answer the need from the field. A recently announced partnership with Polish AI analytics firm Satim will enable automatic detection and classification of military objects in Iceye’s images, expediting the insight gathering process by Ukraine’s defenders.

“The system will be able to look at an object and say — this is a TU95, or this is a tank,” says Cartwright. “If the image is not good enough to provide the classification, we can still provide automated detection.”

SAR data has been so useful to Ukraine’s defenders that the country purchased exclusive access to one of Iceye’s satellites using money donated in a crowd-funded campaign in 2022.

This set-up, according to Cartwright, is an example of innovative approaches to products and business models that sprung up from the pressures of serving a nation at war.

“In the traditional satellite imagery procurement model, customers have to compete for priority on the provider’s assets,” Cartwright says. “In a situation like we have in Ukraine, where our customer is fighting a hot war, that's insufficient. As a result, the customer sought a different business model with us, under which we developed the idea of a dedicated satellite.”

Ukraine still benefits from data gathered by the 44 satellites of Iceye’s fleet providing dozens of revisit opportunities every day, according to Cartwright.

From Weeks and Days to Hours and Minutes

Maxar’s Wilczynski points out the war highlighted the need for advanced AI-driven data analytics algorithms that can cut down the time from image acquisition to information delivery to the customer from “days or weeks” to “hours or minutes.”

Maxar’s fleet of 10 EO satellites photographs Earth’s surface in visible colors in resolutions of up to 30 centimeters. The company has recently partnered with Satellogic, whose satellites image Earth’s surface in lower resolutions but offer more frequent revisits. Maxar also cooperates with Umbra, which is currently building up a constellation of 32 SAR satellites, to add the benefit of night-time and see-through-cloud vision to their customers.

“This war has shown that partnership is really important in the sense that it's very hard to create camouflage that can fool multiple phenomenologies,” Wilczynski says. “You can create a camouflage that fools SAR but doesn’t fool [optical] or that fools [optical] but doesn’t fool SAR. It’s very hard to create decoys when you bring together multiple sensors.”

Wilczinsky says the providers need to use the space assets in a smarter way to flexibly respond to the demands of the military, using cues found in lower-resolution satellite images or collected by military reconnaissance drones to address challenges as they arise.

“This war pushed us to think more about what picture and with which satellite should we take to answer the question rather than just taking images and see what we can extract from them,” Wilczinsky says. “We've been really focused on how to reduce the garbage so that when we apply analytics, we're actually getting valuable data out, as opposed to taking a picture of a region that doesn't have anything going on or of something that was relevant a week ago, but the front has moved.”

Ukraine’s New Directions

Although the war turned Ukraine into a major innovation hub in drone and robotics warfare, the country’s space sector, tediously transitioning from the slow-moving era of Soviet-style state-run institutions, wasn’t quite ready to join the war effort.

“The drone ecosystem became real because people did it themselves and then it became part of the defense effort,” Oleksandr Havrutenko, chief specialist at the Center of Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies at Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, tells Via Satellite. “With space, it doesn’t work like that. We need something that is already operational, something that’s been done a long time ago.”

The cooperation with the likes of Maxar and Iceye has, however, revealed a possible new opportunity for Ukraine to delve into when the war ends. No one in the world depends on space data as much as Ukraine does right now, Havrutenko says. The learning curve for the nation’s satellite image analysts has therefore been steep, providing a direction to innovate in the downstream segment with advanced analytics system capable of fusing data from space-born and aerial sources to maximize tactical advantage.

“Ukraine uses so much space data,” Havrutenko says. “That gives us a lot of room for innovation because we constantly need to process data from different sources, governmental and commercial, fusing that with non-space source of data. It’s a niche that gives us a lot of opportunity.”

The philosophy, Havrutenko added, is to look for gaps in what the western allies offer and find solutions to fill those gaps.

The Ukrainian Global Innovation Strategy compiled by Ukraine’s Ministries of Digital Transformation and Science and Education, includes space among its key areas. It specifically names the development of small satellites and ground infrastructure among the strategic targets but according to available information, no significant development in that field is currently underway. The Ministry of Digital Transformation did not respond to a request to comment.

Havrutenko said that since the war began, Ukraine’s State Space Agency, which should steer the space sector’s development, has been in limbo without an acting head and an effective space program.

“Effectively, there are no space activities in Ukraine in the old-fashioned way now because there is no national governmental program,” Havrutenko says. “It’s certainly an issue because we have capacities. But if you don’t have any activity, you lose competitiveness, you don’t understand trends. That’s what we are facing now.”

Under Siege

Before the war, Ukraine’s legacy rocket factory Pivdenmash, previously Yuzmash, had been supplying first stages for the American Antares rockets. It also used to build engines for Europe’s lightweight Vega launchers. Both partnerships have come to a halt since the Russian invasion.

The sprawling, 370-acre Pivdenmash industrial complex in Ukraine’s industrial hub Dnipro, some 450 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, used to produce the bulk of USSR’s missiles during the Cold War and later the Dnipro and Zenit rocket families. Havrutenko says that in the first months of the war, the strategic factory remained largely spared Russian missile attacks. As the war drew on and the Russians realized they may not be able to conquer Dnipro and seize the facilities, missiles began raining on the factory, causing serious damage.

“Russia has always been a part of our space activities and when the invasion started, they tried to keep those factories safe because they wanted them for themselves,” says Havrutenko. “About two years ago, they began to strike those factories. Some of the R&D offices have since been relocated, but they don’t do much in terms of space technology right now.”

Another source familiar with the situation in Dnipro described the damage to the Pivdenmash rocket factory as “significant.” The facility is reportedly active in Ukraine’s domestic missile development program.

A Space Sector in Limbo

Despite the heritage of Soviet-era rocketry, and perhaps because of the continued Russian influences, Ukraine was only slowly moving towards building up a commercial space industry prior to the invasion. In fact, legislation allowing private space enterprises to register in Ukraine was only passed in 2020. When the war started, the handful of space companies and startups that had emerged in the short period of time faced difficult decisions. Some chose to relocate abroad and continue their work, others set out to help the defense effort.

Dnipro-based Aerobavovna, for example, repurposed their high-altitude balloons, originally designed to lift scientific experiments to the stratosphere, for hosting communication relays and surveillance payloads for the military.

Kyiv-based entrepreneur Misha Rudominsky paused his rocket start-up Promin, building a unique self-eating rocket, to launch Himera, an electronics company that develops secure tactical radio devices to ensure soldiers on the frontline can communicate despite omnipresent jamming and electronic interference.

“We tried early into the invasion to look into defense application of Promin’s technology, but we found we were at a too low technology readiness level to be relevant,” Rudominsky tells Via Satellite. “With Himera, we are solving the communication problem on the battlefield and trying to do it in a way that is much more affordable than the solutions available from the west. For the foreseeable future, this is an area where I feel I can personally do the most for Ukraine.”

Rudominsky’s stance mirrors that of most Ukrainian tech brains. Working in defense tech right now is the second most patriotic thing after serving on the frontline where one faces a daily threat of death. On the back of the tragedy that is the war with Russia, a thriving, high-energy innovation ecosystem had emerged that has a potential to make Ukraine a technology superhub when the war ends.

Being outnumbered one to five in terms of troop numbers, Ukrainians know that outdoing the enemy’s technology is their only chance for a victory. Most of all, they want to stop seeing their friends dying. Hopefully, the time to revive their dreams of space will come sooner than later. VS