ROCKETRY : Ukraine Aerospace Industry Needs Only Some Customers : Breakup of the Soviet Union has left the new nation with the infrastructure and the expertise--but no business.

Joining the world’s exclusive space club is a pricey proposition. Only the wealthy nations like the United States, France and Japan or large countries like China and India can afford it. Brazil, Taiwan and Iran are among the next in line. But the newest contender comes from what appears to be an unlikely corner of the world: Ukraine.

After just four months of independence, Ukrainians would appear to have enough problems on Earth without looking for new ones in space. Ukrainians, however, have been out there ever since Soviet cosmonaut Pavel Popovich orbited the planet in 1962, singing folk songs to ground control.

Ukrainian scientists and industry were an integral part of the Soviet space program, an area in which the Soviet Union excelled; altogether, more than 250,000 people worked in the aerospace industry here. When the breakup of the Soviet Union fragmented its space program, Ukraine gained one of the world’s most advanced aerospace industries, capable of producing everything from rockets to satellites.

But it also lost its biggest customer. Without the Soviet Union to pour money into space exploration, Ukraine is looking for new ways to keep its aerospace industry working.

“Ukraine has a highly developed scientific, technical and industrial base,” said Volodymyr Horbulin, newly appointed chief of the month-old Ukrainian Space Agency.

A rocketry specialist with 30 years of experience, Horbulin is proud of the Soviet Union’s achievements in space. “This was Ukraine’s achievement too,” he notes. “We produced the rockets and satellites for 360 Soviet space launches.”

That figure is less than 10% of the Soviet total over 35 years, but it still places Ukraine way ahead of Japan, all of Western Europe, China and India--combined. Most of Ukraine’s space industry, however, was part of larger projects that involved other Soviet republics, notably Russia.

But Horbulin is confident that today Ukraine, home to more than half of the former Soviet Union’s rocketry specialists, can do the job alone.

The star of Ukraine’s space program is the South Machine-Building Factory, called “Yuzhmash” for short, in Dnepropetrovsk.

Yuzhmash, once a top-secret facility, is opening its doors to foreigners and television crews to film Western-style “info-mercials” to advertise the array of rockets and spacecraft that the plant built over the last 38 years.

According to American assessments, the Soviet space program was, as a Pentagon analysis put it, “overwhelmingly military in character.” But Horbulin has already outlined an ambitious civilian space program that includes basic scientific research, telecommunications and environmental mapping. It also includes military intelligence.

The plan is for the long term, however. Ukraine has such economic problems now that, ironically, it cannot afford a rocket from its own Yuzhmash plant.

For Horbulin, the industry’s best hope for pulling out of its slump is international cooperation--offering its services to build and launch satellites for foreign countries.