7 incidents on the record
Launch failures and groundings
When a launch vehicle fails, it does not fail alone. Other countries lose access to orbit, payloads sit on the ground, and the political case for sovereign launch capability gets a little louder. The entries here are the failures that mattered.
Incidents
- Galileo PRS lockout — United Kingdom · EU, Nov 2018. After Brexit, Britain — a major financial and engineering contributor to Galileo — was barred from the encrypted Public Regulated Service. The UK has since spent close to £100M studying its own sovereign GNSS replacement.
- BeiDou-3 goes global — China, Mar 2015. China activates BeiDou-3, beginning the constellation's global expansion. By the end of the decade BeiDou will have more visible satellites in the sky over much of the world than GPS itself.
- BeiDou regional service — China, Jan 2004. China activates BeiDou-1's regional service. The technical justification is operational; the policy justification, repeated openly in Beijing, is that GPS is operated by an adversary that may switch the lights off.
- Galileo, by Council resolution — European Union, Mar 2002. The Council of the European Union formally launches the Galileo programme. The justification, written down explicitly, is freedom from American GPS as a strategic single point of failure.
- Loral and Hughes under review — USA · China, Jan 1994. Washington opens technology-transfer reviews into Loral and Hughes assistance to China after a string of Long March failures. The reviews will end careers and rewrite American export law for a decade.
- Challenger grounds the West — USA · Allies, Jan 1986. Challenger's loss grounds the Space Shuttle for thirty-two months, stranding allied payloads — German Spacelab, Canadian, ESA — that had been folded into the American manifest. Backup launchers had been quietly let to atrophy.
- Cosmos 954 falls on Canada — USSR · Canada, Jan 1978. A Soviet nuclear-powered radar satellite re-enters uncontrollably and scatters radioactive debris across the Northwest Territories. Canada bills Moscow $6M for the cleanup. The Soviets pay half.