Russia Must Choose: Low Tech or High? (original) (raw)

James Oberg, who spent 22 years in NASA Mission Control and is the NBC News space consultant, is the author of, among other books, "Star-Crossed Orbits: Inside the U.S.-Russian Space Alliance."

February 3, 2013

With the arrival of a new team of spaceflight players, and with the U.S. and Europe already transitioning to a new generation of space access hardware, Russia’s dominant position in “spacelift” – meaning big rockets – looks more and more like a blind alley. Far-sighted Moscow space experts have expressed concern that Russia has boxed itself in as a low-tech truck driver for other nations’ payloads, which then are performing the commercial space services where the real money is.

Moscow has consoled itself with lucrative launch contracts, which provide about a third of the space agency’s annual budget. But when new U.S. commercial spacelift gears up, along with major booster production enhancements in China and India, even those could fade away.

The Russian space program has specialized in lift capability, becoming a truck driver for other nations’ lucrative payloads.

As of now, Russia’s only other claim to space pride is its role in the International Space Station. Its rockets carry all crewmembers from the partner nations, as well as a large fraction of the support cargo and equipment. NASA has agreed to a permanent crew ratio of three Russians to two Americans, with a sixth slot rotating among the other nations involved in the project.

But that's it. There aren't any other jewels left in the Soviet-era “space crown.” Russia hasn’t launched a successful interplanetary or lunar mission in a quarter century. Its navigation satellite system, Glonass, can compete only because of protectionist policies limiting foreign systems.

Russian weather satellites are practically nonexistent. The nation buys 80 percent of its earth observation data from overseas providers, and a similar fraction of its electronic components for its satellites. And even the space station’s reputation may be overblown: last year a returning cosmonaut criticized the Russian module's marginal livability and obsolete science capability compared to the modern U.S., European and Japanese segments.

And even in the one category of space services that Russia does dominate, launchers – which constitutes about 3 percent of the world’s space commerce – their management has seemed unable to stem an embarrassingly high failure rate brought on by an aging work force, an atrophied safety culture and decaying infrastructure. Grandiose plans for a new booster family called “Angara” have been delayed for years, and the rocket only managed to fly at all as the first stage of the South Korean launch vehicle a few days ago.

No longer even capable of going it alone, much less leading, Russia has become an enthusiastic proponent of partnering with other more technologically advanced and capable nations. And in such a role its islands of remaining expertise can contribute useful hardware and services here and there.

But it is in such areas that the greatest threats to the Russian space program are now looming. It’s not just the new booster systems around the world that promise to outperform and undersell Russian rockets. Even in other remaining traditional Russian strengths, competition has appeared. China tested an embryonic but very sophisticated space station module last summer, and completed its first interplanetary mission in December.

With all these new options, there is less and less that Russia's space industry can produce that anyone else in the world needs to buy from Moscow.

How Russia reacts to this crisis in the coming years will determine what sort of space program it, and the whole world, will have a decade from now.

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Topics: international relations, space