International Technology : Russia Rockets Rising : Moscow wants its share of a booming market.

Amid exorbitant pastries and a press of Russian reporters, space officials signed a historic contract in late April for the first commercial launch of a Western-built satellite by a Russian rocket.

The price tag, $36 million plus unspecified added expenses, was enough to strike fear in the French dominator of the satellite launch market, Arianespace, and several American competitors. Similar launches in the West normally cost at least $60 million.

If all goes as planned and a Russian Proton rocket blasts off in 1995 with a satellite for Inmarsat, the 67-country consortium that puts up satellites for mobile communications, it could mark the start of a small Russian revolution in the burgeoning sphere of global space services.

"When that happens, some industry in the West is not going to like it," said Olof Lundberg, the director general of London-based Inmarsat. "There's one more player to join the market.

"In the long run, I don't think Russian space industry will dominate the market," he said, "but it has the potential to play an important role."

If, that is, it can win several battles. These involve politics, technology and logistics.

The first battle is a political one.

At least four times in the past, Russian space firms have been on the verge of signing contracts similar to the Inmarsat deal, but they found themselves stymied when it came to gaining U.S. permission for export of the satellite components.

As Yuri Milov, deputy director of the Russian Space Agency sees it, his competitors are making awfully clever use of leftover Cold War restrictions on technology transfer.

"Arianespace and American firms see us not as political opponents but as commercial competitors who do something better and cheaper," Milov said. Yet, they benefit from political roadblocks that technically remain even after President Clinton promised Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin at their latest summit in Vancouver to help remove them.

Because all Western satellites contain American components, the United States has virtual veto power over all launches, and it continues to adhere to Cold War-era bans on exporting high technology to the republics of the former Soviet Union.

The Inmarsat deal is the first to have gained all the American licenses needed to export the satellite, officials said, but it received only a one-time permission, cleared by then-President George Bush. A landmark deal between Russian space scientists and Motorola to launch 21 low-station communications satellites in 1996 is still waiting for final permission from the U.S. government. As a result, to Russians, it looks like the U.S. government is intentionally dragging its feet to keep Moscow from snatching some of the launch market from American companies.

"Strangely enough," the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta wrote recently, "the nations which have been tirelessly making assurances as to their favorable view of our reform efforts, which have long been promising massive financial aid . . . and constantly sending us humanitarian aid--these very nations are going out of their way to prevent us earning money where we can do so."

Russian space officials emphasize that they are not out to seize the market for Western satellite launches. They just want a chunk of it.

"There is enough for everyone," said Dmitri Poluhin, director of the Salyut design bureau that signed the deal with Inmarsat. He argued that Ariane has applications for 39 satellites a year but can launch only 10, so customers sometimes have long waits.

"We, too, can only put up between 10 and 13 satellites a year," Poluhin said. "They take painstaking preparation. So if no one gets greedy, there's enough for everyone."

Russian officials particularly stressed that the American launch firms--Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics--generally use smaller rockets than Russia's Proton and depend largely on defense contracts, so Russian launchers would not directly compete with them. Since the 1986 Challenger explosion, Ariane has reported making about 60% of the space launches.

Added to their sales pitch is the argument that Russia must make a go of its commercial satellite launches if it wants to keep its entire space program, once a showpiece of Soviet science, afloat. Russian Space Agency Director Yuri Koptev said recently that the agency hopes to earn between $200 million and $300 mil- lion in commercial ventures in coming months, but it is also asking for tens of mil lions in Russian government support that may not come through. About 30,000 employees left the space program's production sector and 40,000 left design bureaus in 1992, he said.

The Clinton Administration is clearly caught in a bind.