This is the first crash of a Russian cargo ship for thirty years. The ship Progress M-12M, which was to supply the International Space Station (ISS), catapulted the wrong orbit by the Soyuz rocket, crashed Aug. 24 in a desert region of Altai (South of Western Siberia) . A week earlier, the Russian space agency Roskosmos has lost contact with the Express AM4 communications satellite, launched by the Proton rocket. The Russian Space Agency (Roskosmos) has lost contact with six satellites over the last nine months, representing a total cost of 16 billion rubles (400 million), according to estimates.
A sector that has suffered from funding amnque
These few accidents have nothing to coincidence. A series of failures and a multitude of launch delays "for technical problems" are symptomatic of the troubles facing the aerospace sector in Russia.According to experts, they are the result of lack of funding in the 1990s. After the fall of the USSR, the government was not able to support programs in the aerospace industry in the long run, leaving this area for many years. Funding for this sector has taken the early 2000s, with an annual budget that has tripled between 2005 and 2011, increasing to $ 3 billion (2.1 billion euros), of which 700 million (490 million) in the form of commercial contracts. However, the salary of a junior engineer in a design office in Moscow Roskosmos always varies between 20,000 and 25,000 rubles (500 to 625 euros), while the average salary was over 40,000 rubles (1,000 euros) in the capital Russia in July this year.
A technology gap
Moreover, the funding problem, everything happened right after the fall of the Soviet Union, the sector has accumulated since its inception in the 1960s an important technological gap. According to the Scientific Director of the Space Policy Institute Ivan Moissev interviewed by the Russian daily Vedomosti, the current failures in the sector are linked with the Soviet legacy. At the time, the state spent a large budget for space exploration, and Russian rockets were cheaper than American rockets. As a result, all equipment were mass produced, not that special attention be paid to quality. "A satellite was lost soon be replaced by a new," recalls one specialist Roskosmos, noting that before 1991, the space agency was not used to account for missed assignments.Today, trying to fill Roskosmos somehow technological backwardness of its devices by integrating systems of foreign manufacture. But this poses problems of compatibility between them.
Soyuz is not affected in Guyana
European partners, however, remain optimistic about Russian involvement in the Galileo project. Russia announced in 2010 its intention to join the program launch navigation systems alternative to the American GPS. The project led by the European Space Agency (ESA), will start on October 20 with a deployment in orbit of the first two satellites from the Guiana Space Center (SMC), through the Soyuz. Asked by Les Echos Friday, Jean-Jacques Dordain, Director General of ESA into perspective. "We're doing a difficult job.The difference between success and failure is minimal, simply a failed component to move from one to another, "said he.
Having sacked the former head of the Russian Space Agency in April, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered Roskosmos to make changes "radical" in the production cycle of spacecraft. The management agency has also decided to suspend for now the launch of all flights of Soyuz spacecraft until the cause of the accident with the vessel Progress to be clarified.
Since the withdrawal of the U.S. shuttle Atlantis, France and Russia are the only replenishment of the International Space Station with its Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATV), launched by Ariane and Soyuz.
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