Time of the latter. What did we celebrate on April 12th?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

On April 12, 2017, we celebrated another anniversary of the first manned flight into space. Of course, this date is not round and not even "semicircular" - but, in general, in history, epoch-making events do not happen on anniversary dates: after all, back in 1957, in the year of the fortieth anniversary of the Great October Revolution and in the year of the First Sputnik, no one believed that in four years the first spacecraft with a man on board will be launched into Earth's orbit - and that man will become a citizen of the USSR, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

We celebrate this Cosmonautics Day in a completely different country, in a situation where Russia has found itself in the position of catching up, whose space technologies are quite consistent with the present day - but may turn out to be outdated and ineffective in the future of a decade

Suffice it to say that Russia today has a large part of the space reserve - it is still Soviet developments, which still cannot be endlessly modernized and modified in the race for scientific and technological progress. Korolev's Soyuz and Chelomeev's Protons, originally from the 1960s, still form the backbone of Russia's rocket fleet. While the most famous Russian "long-term space" rocket, the Angara rocket, did not replace these old missiles - the second launch of the Angara-A5 heavy launch vehicle was again postponed to 2018, and the light Angara 1.2 "will only go into space in 2019. There is no need to talk about the revival of complexes like the Soviet colossus "Energia-Buran" - there are no specialists, technologies and even entire enterprises that are critically necessary for projects of this level and scale have been lost.

The situation with the creation of payloads for new missiles is no less sad. It is worth remembering not only the widely advertised isolated successes, but also a lot of failures and annoying delays - for example, the multifunctional module "Science", the creation of which began back in 1995, did not start to the ISS. The launch of the module, scheduled for the end of 2017, may again be canceled due to a detected clogging in the fuel system and other malfunctions. Things are even sadder with spacecraft for exploration of deep space - against the background of the successes of the United States, the European Union and even Japan in creating automatic stations for exploring the solar system, the Russian cosmonautics is haunted by constant failures, during which automatic stations fail right in orbit - just remember the stations "Mars-96" or "Phobos-soil".

All these facts show not "jubilee", but completely systemic problems in Russian cosmonautics - any rocket or satellite does not begin with a newspaper report about a successful launch (this is, rather, a final chord), but are created by the painstaking and daily work of the whole industry, as Korolev created for a whole decade, his famous "seven", step by step improving and perfecting the fairly simple technologies of the first Soviet missiles.

And today we see completely different news: the entire production reserve for the second and third stages has been withdrawn from almost ready-made Proton launch vehicles - and this is almost 71 engines! Withdrawn - this means that the engines are rejected and the manufacturer needs to completely redo all the products. There is no other way to act - the sensational disaster of the Soyuz-U rocket in December 2016, when the Progress cargo ship was lost, was caused by the same negligence and manufacturing defects. This, by the way, became one of the reasons that only two cosmonauts are sent to the ISS in the last Russian crew - the scarce third place in the Soyuz is now occupied by a cargo container.

The list of failures, delays and losses of Russian cosmonautics can be continued for quite a long time, but the main question that must be answered sounds differently - what can we celebrate today and, more importantly, how is Russian cosmonautics going to survive further?

It must be admitted that for the period 1991-2017, the Russian space sector has practically exhausted the Soviet reserve, and then all those involved in the space industry have a simple choice: either to correspond to the very "time of the first", which has always moved forward astronautics, or to lose the whole industry Russian industry and those very "home and grain places", which have become for many would-be leaders, commanding posts in the industry, which was forgiven a lot and often. Again, they were forgiven solely out of respect for the "time of the first" who did the impossible and miraculous, first in 1957, and then in 1961, but which the Russian cosmonautics has not shown for a very long time.

There is nothing impossible in this: in the early 2000s, the aviation industry adjacent to space was in the same situation. It seemed that the civil aircraft industry was lost in Russia forever - but there were people in the industry who brought the Russian aircraft industry out of a deep crisis. I would like to believe that there are still such people in the Russian space department, that life itself will make them understand: the "point of no return" for Russian cosmonautics is too close and monstrously dangerous.