Russia’s Rockets

What’s wrong with them?

“The Russian space sector is short of funding, and may be having difficulties maintaining its quality control standards,” said John Logsdon, a Planetary Society board member and professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.

Additionally, Russia’s workforce is shrinking. Since the 1990s, the country’s population has steadily declined, despite an influx of more than 9 million immigrants. Those migrants have filled some of the country’s job vacancies, but the overall effect, according to the Brookings Institute, is that Russia faces a sharp decline in labor quality.

Worse yet, due to larger economic pressures, the country isn’t able to make large-scale education investments, said David Belcher, an analysis manager at the Washington, D.C.-based Avascent consulting group.

“The effect of that is that they have a skills mismatch in certain industrial sectors, that appears to include the launch industry,” he told me. “The fact that we’ve seen several instances of Russian rockets not working as designed the past few years seems to support that thesis.”

And yet we’re relying on them to get our astronauts to the ISS, because “safety is the highest priority.”

[Mid-afternoon update]

Looks like the stage went kablooey. Which is kind of bad, because it’s the same one they use for crew. Wonder if it would have been abortable?

[Update a few minutes later]

A reminder that Jim Oberg warned about this over a year ago.

6 thoughts on “Russia’s Rockets”

  1. The Soviet rocket work force learned that job security mean being irreplaceable. So they never wrote anything down, except in personal notebooks, and even then sometimes in code. All knowledge was tribal. It has proven more difficult to bring in young replacements than anyone thought, and I imagine that some of the old timers died before they could pass along their knowledge. Mistakes will continue to happen as new people learn how to do things. It will eventually get better, I’m sure.

    In the U.S. the same thing has happened in the intercontinental ballistic missile world, where only a handful of people (perhaps 30 or so) are left of the people who did the system engineering on our last system (Peacekeeper). I’m watching as they try to develop a new one (Land Based Strategic Defense, or LBSD is the Air Force designation – which sounds like like a sexual-oriented political movement rather than a weapon system), and it’s clear to me that we probably will never have a replacement for Minuteman.

    1. it’s clear to me that we probably will never have a replacement for Minuteman

      I suppose it doesn’t have the same throw weight but why not just manufacture more Trident missiles and use land based emplacements if you want those?

  2. “Looks like the stage went kablooey.”

    Sigh. Still trying to impress us all with your expertise in rocketry by the use of highly technical terms (like “kablooey”) I see.

  3. The Russians seem to be having a lot of issues with their upper stages. As for quality control they’ve never been able to get that right. To a large degree there is also a lot of duplication and stupid political games in their space sector. For example why wasn’t Angara designed with the RD-180 as a base engine to begin with, since the US had already paid for its development and there was a manufacturing line available, why did they have to design a whole new engine? Politics.
    Why are there no plans to replace Soyuz with Angara? Its Khrunichev vs RKK Energia. In the 1960s it was Korolev vs Chemolei vs Yangel.

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