Russia Falls, China Rises in Space Efforts
Amy Svitak - Aviation Week
The two largest space powers outside the U.S. had wildly divergent records in 2011, with Beijing boasting 19 launches and demonstrating in-orbit docking for a future space station while the Kremlin ordered an investigation into a string of high-profile engineering failures plaguing Russia’s space program.
The implications for Russia of a nosedive in the quality of its space efforts could be especially serious. The failures have been condemned by President Dmitry Medvedev, and the efforts at recovery will be watched carefully beyond Russia. The troubles have hit just as NASA has become reliant on its International Space Station (ISS) partner for manned spaceflights and as Moscow seeks to expand its commercial reach with launches from South America.
Meanwhile, China—only the third nation to develop its own capability to launch humans into orbit and long a player in commercial launch services—is growing increasingly confident.
Last month, top Russian officials demanded an inquiry into a spate of mishaps over the past 13 months that included the loss of a robotic Mars probe and a launch failure that sent an ISS-bound cargo carrier crashing to Earth.
With the Dec. 23 appointment of Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s envoy to NATO, to serve as deputy premier of defense procurement, the Russian space agency Roscosmos is under mounting pressure to explain the cause of its botched missions. In a Dec. 29 Twitter post, Rogozin indicated that the findings of an investigation are imminent.
“On Thursday, waiting for the report of the management of Roscosmos about the causes of accidents,” Rogozin said.
The new deputy premier’s probe comes on the heels of remarks made by Russia’s top space official, Vladimir Popovkin, who last month said the series of engineering mishaps had led to a crisis in the country’s space industry. Roscosmos caught a break, however, with the successful in-orbit delivery of six Globalstar-2 communication satellites launched atop a Russian Soyuz rocket Dec. 28. That mission capped an otherwise rough year for the country’s space industry.
The series of setbacks began in December 2010 when a Proton-M rocket failed to put three Glonass-M navigation satellites into orbit. The botched mission was followed by the loss of a Geo-IK-2 military satellite launched atop a Rockot vehicle in February.
A shakeup among top space officials last April replaced former Roscosmos chief Anatoly Perminov with Popovkin. But with the exception of a few bright spots—the Oct. 21 launch of the first Soyuz mission outside the former Soviet Union from Europe’s South American spaceport and a successful effort to bring Russia’s constellation of 24 Glonass navigation satellites back from the brink of collapse—the problems persist.
On Aug. 18, a Russian Proton-M rocket lost the Express-AM4, a large, expensive telecom satellite designed to provide digital television and secure government communications for Siberia and the Far East. The mishap, which dropped the Russian-owned, Astrium-built Express-AM4 into a useless orbit, was caused by a worker who fed a faulty parameter into the rocket’s flight software system.
One week after the Express-AM4 loss, a Soyuz-U rocket engine malfunctioned 325 sec. after launch, preventing the Progress M-12M cargo spacecraft from reaching orbit and sending the rocket and spacecraft crashing to Earth. Soyuz missions to the space station were delayed as Roscosmos investigated the August incident, raising alarm among Russia’s ISS partners, including NASA, which relies solely on Soyuz vehicles to ferry astronauts to the orbiting outpost since retiring its space shuttle fleet last year. To date, however, Russia’s engineering failures have had only marginal effects on Moscow’s collaboration with the U.S. space agency, which will depend on Soyuz launchers and spacecraft to access the ISS until a domestic capability comes on line later this decade.
Still, Roscosmos has been criticized in recent weeks by senior government officials, including a scathing rebuke from Medvedev, who raised the prospect of criminal prosecution of officials deemed responsible for space accidents.
“Recent failures are a strong blow to our competitiveness. It does not mean that something fatal has happened, it means that we need to carry out a detailed review and punish those who are guilty,” Medvedev told reporters in televised comments in late November. “I am not suggesting putting them up against the wall like under Josef Vissarionovich [Stalin], but seriously punishing either financially or, if the fault is obvious, it could be a disciplinary or even criminal punishment.”
Medvedev’s comments came in the weeks following the loss of Russia’s Phobos-Grunt mission, a robotic probe designed to return soil samples from one of Mars’ moons that has been stranded in low Earth orbit since its Nov. 8 launch.
More recently, a Meridian military communications satellite crashed in Siberia shortly after liftoff Dec. 23 atop a Soyuz-2 rocket launched from Plesetsk Cosmodrome.
And on Dec. 26, International Launch Services (ILS) deferred a planned launch of the SES-4 commercial telecom satellite atop an ILS Proton vehicle, delaying the mission for approximately 25 days after Khrunichev engineers at the launch site received an anomalous telemetry reading on the rocket’s Breeze-M upper stage during preflight testing.
During the next two years Russia plans to increase space spending, though the troubles plaguing Roscosmos likely stem from a broader issue of weaknesses in Russia’s science programs, where low pay and a lack of political support are driving out engineers and technicians.
The European launch consortium Arianespace, which managed the Dec. 28 Soyuz launch for Globalstar, says the mission demonstrates the continued reliability of the Soyuz launcher, and in particular its Fregat upper stage.
“This latest success for the Soyuz launcher—and for the Fregat upper stage (29 missions, 29 successes)—clearly indicates the capabilities of the Samara Space Center and NPO Lavochkin, as well as the skills of the operating teams working under the authority of Russian space agency Roscosmos,” Arianespace said in a statement.
To date, questions about Soyuz launch failures have not affected vehicles serving the ISS nor launches of non-Russian satellites for commercial or other missions, whether from Baikonur Cosmodrome or Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, where Soyuz began operating in October. However, the issue of quality control with regard to Russia’s Proton rocket could have implications for ILS, which manages commercial launches of the Russian rocket.
In the meantime, China Great Wall Industry Corp. is poised for a banner year in 2012. Last week the company touted 19 launches in 2011, up four from the previous year, and announced plans for five commercial missions for international customers this year, including the Apstar-7 and Apstar-7B telecom satellites for Hong Kong-based APT, two remote-sensing satellites and a piggyback launch of a LuxSpace Sarl-built micro-satellite used for maritime surveillance.
“Moreover, the Long March 2D launch vehicle will be used for international customers for the first time,” the company said in a Dec. 27 statement, referring to a variant of the Long March used to loft Chinese reconnaissance orbiters that is capable of delivering 3,100 kg to low Earth orbit.
In the past 12 months, the Long March vehicle launched Pakistan’s first communications satellite, the PakSat-1R, and European satellite operator Eutelsat’s W3C, the first Western commercial satellite to be launched from China since a U.S. tech transfer crackdown in the 1990s.
The successful rendezvous and docking of China’s Tiangong-1 Orbiter and Shenzhou-8 spacecraft last year further demonstrated Beijing’s growing emphasis on research and development as the country presses ahead with plans to build and orbit a space station.
Beijing also signed contracts in 2011 to build and launch Bolivia’s Tupac Katari telecommunications satellite, Belarus’ first telecom satellite, Venzuela’s VRSS-1 satellite and several launch services programs, according to China Great Wall, the nation’s sole entity tasked with building and launching commercial spacecraft for international customers.
“With these contracts, China’s space industry will realize the breakthrough of the export of Chinese-made remote-sensing satellites and expand its communications satellite sale to the European market,” the company said Dec. 27.
Will China shame the US back to strong space program?
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