Kazakhstan’s seizure of Russian space assets threatens the Soyuz-5 rocket

The Soviet Union created the Baikonur Cosmodrome in 1955 to serve as a test site for intercontinental ballistic missiles. A few years later it became the world's first spaceport with the launch of the historic Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1 missions. The sprawling cosmodrome was a mainstay of the Soviet space program.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia leased the spaceport from the government of Kazakhstan and currently has an agreement to use the facilities through the year 2050. Russia pays an annual lease fee of about $100 million. Neither country is particularly happy with the relationship; the Kazakh government feels like it is under-compensated, and the Russian government would like it to be in its own country, which is why it has moved in recent years to build a new launch site for most of its rockets in the Far East of Russia, at Vostochny.

Despite some of this uneasiness, however, the two governments have been working together on future space projects. For example, the main Russian space corporation, Roscosmos, has been developing a new medium-lift rocket that it anticipates launching from Baikonur. This is the Soyuz-5 vehicle, a three-stage rocket powered by RD-171 engines that will burn kerosene fuel. Russia is counting on this vehicle to replace its aging Proton-M rocket and be more cost-competitive with commercial rockets such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster.

Russia plans to launch the Soyuz-5 rocket from the "Baiterek" launch pad at Baikonur and intended to initiate preliminary construction work on the site in 2022. But those plans now face significant uncertainty.

Arresting assets

Earlier this month, a Kazakh news site, KZ24, reported that the Republic of Kazakhstan had seized the property of TsENKI, the Center for Utilization of Ground-based Space Infrastructure, in Kazakhstan. This firm, which is a subsidiary of Roscosmos, is responsible for launch pads and ground support equipment for the Russian space corporation. According to the report, which was translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell, TsENKI is barred from removing any assets or materials from Kazakhstan.

"A ban on utilizing resources and conducting financial operations, as well as instability in negotiating positions as a whole are slowing down the priority direction of work at Baikonur, namely the construction of a new launch pad for the Soyuz-5 Booster," the report states.

Russia has already spent nearly $1 billion on the development of the new Soyuz-5 rocket and plans for its launch site and ground services. When Ars wrote about the rocket's development in 2017, it was slated to debut in 2021. Now it is unlikely to debut before at least 2024—and given the current dispute with Kazakhstan, it likely will be delayed much longer into the future.

There are some interesting and complicated politics at play between the two countries. Kazakhstan has nominally been a sovereign nation since 1991, but in the last three decades, it has maintained close ties to Russia and lies well within the Russo-political sphere.

Russian politics

However, Russia's invasion of Ukraine appears to have changed the calculus of this relationship. Namely, Kazakhstan's president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, apparently sees Russia's preoccupation with Ukraine as a window of opportunity to assert greater autonomy for Kazakhstan.

Russia, for its part, has pushed back on further autonomy for Kazakhstan. Weakening ties with the large country to its south could lead to a further crumbling of the Russian Federation. At times, the rhetoric has grown heated. For example, former Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev has called Kazakhstan an "artificial state" and, on the Russian social media site VKontakte, accused the neighboring country of planning genocide against ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan.

It appears to be good politics for Kazakh officials to stand up to this kind of bluster. The dispute over TsENKI's assets in Kazakhstan has been spearheaded by Kazakh Communications Minister Bagdat Musin, who sees political value in asserting this independence from Russia. Musin has said his government needed to seize the assets, in part, because of a lack of communication with the chief of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov.

Borisov, who prefers to keep a low profile, and at least in his public dealings with NASA has struck an apolitical posture, has so far not commented on the dispute. Nor has Roscosmos said anything on its Telegram channel, which now effectively acts as its primary public outreach tool.