The old guard may be turning against the Russian space program

“In recent years, the leaders are blowing more smoke than doing anything substantive.”

Eric Berger – Dec 4, 2018 6:30 pm | 190

In 1998, STS-91 Mission Specialist and Russian cosmonaut Valery Victorovitch Ryumin is assisted with his flight suit prior to his entry into the space shuttle Discovery. Credit: NASA

Leaders

Ryumin says that the current leader of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, “may be talented and a pretty good organizer, but in order to survive in this business, you need to know the history and have real experience. It takes a lot of time.”

And Rogozin doesn’t have that experience, Ryumin said. “He’s not a space specialist but a journalist,” the former cosmonaut said. (Mostly a politician during his career, Rogozin graduated from Moscow State University in 1986 with a degree in journalism).

The former cosmonaut—who also had a long career at one of Russia’s primary aerospace contractors, RSC Energia—also criticized a rotating door of leadership at his old firm. The financially troubled company seems to have no plans for revitalization and no public accountability.

Speaking of RSC Energia’s management, Ryumin said, “Some oversight committee has to make the most important decisions. What kind of committee it is, where it came from, what authority it has, what its responsibilities are—no one knows. Nothing is written down about it in any case.”

Federation

The interviewer, the Russian author and journalist Vladimir Gubarev, also asked about Russia’s plans to develop the “Federation” spacecraft, which Russian officials have billed as a response to NASA’s Orion spacecraft. The Federation capsule, too, will have the capability to go into deep space.

Gubarev does not believe that will happen, however, saying, “Even if we build Federation, it won’t be a quality ship, much less up to date technologically. What the Americans and Europeans are doing, in my view, is a fundamental qualitative breakthrough.”

Ryumin agrees, noting that the Russian space program has been working on Federation for a decade and it is unlikely to fly humans until the mid-2020s.

“Even if we build Federation, we don’t have any way to launch it into space,” Ryumin said. “There’s no booster for it, and no money to build it. There are only decisions that we need to build a ship and a new booster. But there’s nothing else besides words. We’ve been given a task but no means to fulfill it.”

There is, notionally at least, a booster for Federation. Originally, it was supposed to launch on the Rus-M rocket, which was canceled in 2011. Then it was to launch on the Angara A5 rocket, but last year Russian officials said instead it would launch on the Soyuz-5 rocket, because this booster will cost less. This conceptual rocket may make its debut sometime in the mid-2020s. Even if the Soyuz-5 is developed, it will not be powerful enough to launch Federation beyond low Earth orbit.

“The Americans are actively exploring the Moon,” Ryumin said. “We also talk about it, but how are we going to explore? No one knows. Because we don’t have ships; we don’t have boosters that can do it.”