38 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/JANUARY 15-FEBRUARY 1, 2015 AviationWeek.com/awst
PERSON OF THE YEARover the Norwegian Sea in the far
north has seen a modest increase in
the number of scrambles carried out
in response to Russian military flights,
although the number of aircraft inter-
cepted has increased from 58 aircraft
in 2013 to 80 during 2014. Russian
aircraft have also been intercepted by
Turkish F-16s over the Black Sea and
in one incident by Portuguese F-16s
over the Atlantic.
NATO has stepped up surveillance
flights using its E-3 Sentry airborne
early warning aircraft over Romania
and Poland to monitor Russian air
activity; the U.S. Air Force has in-
creased its own surveillance flights
with missions by RC-135 Rivet Joints
flying daily from the U.K. to
mission areas in the Baltic,
the Norwegian Sea and into
Eastern Europe.
The increase in Russian
flights has drawn the atten-
tion of aviation safety regu-
lators. Europe’s skies are
considerably busier with
commercial air traffic than
they were during the ’60s and
’70s, yet many Russian mili-
tary aircraft flying through
international airspace do so
without radar transponders,
responding to radio transmis-
sions or filing flight plans. In
December, the European
Commission primed the Eu-
ropean Aviation Safety Agen-
cy to investigate several near
mid-air collisions between commercial
and military aircraft.
The most significant was an appar-
ent near-collision between a Russian
reconnaissance aircraft—believed to
be an Ilyushin Il-20 “Coot”—and a
Boeing 737 operated by Scandinavian
Airlines, of the coast of Sweden last
March. The incident was not inves-
tigated by safety authorities, but the
European think-tank European Lead-
ership Network report describes the
incident as one of the most provocative
between East and West since the Cold
War. A similar incident was reported
in mid-December.
Naval activity has also been on the
rise. Russian submarines are at the
heart of one highly publicized hunt in
the territorial waters in the Stockholm
archipelago wherein Swedish naval
forces searched, unsuccessfully, for
what was said to be a minisubmarine.
Further hunts, first revealed by
Aviation Week in mid-December and
then January have taken place of the
west coast of Scotland. The incidents
are believed to have involved a Russian
hunter-killer submarine attempting to
track one of the U.K.’s Vanguard-class
ballistic missile submarines. And in
an embarrassing sign of how budget
hawks in London may have mortgaged
essential military capabilities, the U.K.,
without an anti-submarine warfare
wing, had to call in maritime patrol air-
craft from Canada, France and the U.S.SPACE
Despite cooperation in civil space eforts
that overcame Cold War political difer-
ences and the increasing space collabo-ration between Russia and the West, the
global space industry has encountered
myriad impacts over the past year. Pu-
tin’s reach disrupted U.S.-Russian talks
on extended use of the International
Space Station (ISS) and has intensified
political debate in Washington as to the
future of U.S. launchers.
In recent weeks, Russian space
agency Roscosmos has even suggested
it could develop an alternative to the
ISS, the massive orbital outpost led by
the U.S. and Russia that is arguably the
world’s most politically complex space
program. In a year-end news confer-
ence, Roscosmos chief Oleg Ostapenko
said the agency is considering station
options in support of Moscow’s broad-
er manned spaceflight ambitions. He
said the project would be part of the
nation’s forthcoming 10-year space
roadmap for 2016-25.
“This is an ambitious project which
will allow us to keep track of more than90% of the territory of Russia,” Osta-
penko said of the initiative. “It [could
become an] outpost for lunar explora-
tion and deep space.”
The 10-year plan had been expected
to address Washington’s proposal for
extending the ISS four years beyond
its planned retirement in 2020, though
geopolitical tensions have for the mo-
ment frozen any talk about extended
Russian participation in the program.
As relations between Moscow and
the West erode, Putin is highlighting
prospects for increased high-tech co-
operation with China, including defense
and space collaboration.
And in January, Roscosmos deputy
chief Sergei Savelyev said development
of a national space station, if
it were to go forward, would
be tied to continued use of
the ISS and furthering coop-
eration with China, which is
constructing its own manned
outpost in low Earth orbit.
In Washington, the
Ukraine situation has reset
the debate over the future of
U.S. launchers, accelerating
protests in the U.S. Capitol
against using Russian-made
engines to lift U.S. payloads
to space, notably the RD-180
that powers the first stage of
the United Launch Alliance
(ULA) Atlas 5 rocket.
So far, Moscow has not
cut off supply of the NPO
Energomash-made engines,
although U.S. lawmakers recently ap-
proved legislation that seeks to gradu-
ally wean the Pentagon from its reli-
ance on the RD-180 and other Russian
space hardware.
Buried in the 2015 omnibus spend-
ing act that became law in December,
Congress appropriated $220 million to
find an alternative rocket propulsion
system. A report accompanying the om-
nibus gives the Air Force six months to
draft a technology maturation program
for the new development, dubbed the
Competitive Rocket Innovation Motor/
Engine Arrangement (Crimea) by law-
makers. The efort is expected to cul-
minate in a demo by 2019—the deadline
Congress has given for ending use of
the Russian propulsion system.
In parallel, political vulnerability
to the RD-180 has prompted ULA to
co-fund development of a replacement
engine with Blue Origin, an entrepre-
neurial space venture. Known as theMoscow launched an internal PR campaign against sanc-
tions by selling T-shirts that read: “Topols aren’t afraid of
sanctions,” in reference to Russia’s mobile ICBM.