Flightless offspring "Roscosmos"
2011 year can be called one of the most unfortunate years for the national astronautics. Four major space catastrophes: February 2011 - Geo-IK-2 geodesic satellite loss, August 2011 - two catastrophes at once - loss of a communication satellite and progress of a cargo ship, and here is another catastrophe - a loss to an orbit (in other words, loss) Phobos-Grunt apparatus. Moreover, the loss of Phobos-Grunt is the most devastating failure of the Russian cosmonautics, since this project began its development from the last century, and a huge amount of various resources were spent on it. The claimed cost of the device itself is not so great in its current scale - about 5 billion rubles. However, in the time that has elapsed since the appearance of the very idea of the apparatus, which was to explore the surface of one of the satellites of Mars, the creation of calculation tables and software components alone cost a very round sum. This is not to mention the salaries and bonuses received by the leaders, designers and workers of the Lavochkin NPO. And today, with a fairly calm look, the general director and he, in combination, the general designer of that very famous Lavochkin NPO, Viktor Khartov, says that the mission of the Phobos-Grunt apparatus will not be completed in any case. They say that there are trials about “what to do?” And “who is to blame?” Victor Hartov himself is inclined to believe that failure with the spacecraft rests on software flaws. But, they say, there is nothing terrible - everything is insured there.
But didn’t it all matter about insurance, or our Roscosmos has long and finally become not the forefront of domestic science, but a workshop that is focused on solving only monetary issues. Fly - well, do not fly - insurance companies will return the money - that's the whole problem, according to agency representatives.
Even if the problem of "Phobos-Grunt" really lies in program errors, then who prevented Mr. Hartov from checking the correctness of all systems? It seems to be far behind those days when all flights were calculated solely on paper using the abilities of several dozen mathematicians. Or computer systems of NPO im.Lavochkina do not allow to calculate possible extraordinary situations that may arise during the flight of a spacecraft? If so, then why was it necessary at all to take on such an ambitious project. Then Hartov and Roscosmos officials would have forgotten about their own ambitions, and they would have installed their spectrometers and thermo-detectors on the American rover Curiosity, which, by the way, was not only successfully launched, but even sends information signals that, in connection with our space recent failures look really impressive.
Sometimes it seems that people who are appointed to senior positions in Roskosmos and its subsidiaries simply deliberately do everything against the real development of the national cosmonautics. Of course, this judgment is exaggerated, but such a number of failures in a very short time period is difficult to explain.
There is an opinion according to which all the failures of the past few months are connected with the underfunding of the scientific component of the projects. If we take this as a basis, we get the following situation. In research centers about Roscosmos there are people who are forced to work for low wages and without the necessary financial investments in the projects being implemented. However, no one, for some reason, quits and does not even try to say that, they say, sir, give me more money, otherwise our “cans” will not fly. “Underfinanced” designers continue to draw something with blunt pencils on scraps of paper, “underfinanced” workers continue to collect something from improvised means, “underfinanced” programmers reluctantly fill the program codes with their left hand, and “underfinanced” cleaners poorly rub floors in the assembly hall - the dust of the authorities and climbs into the eyes, not letting see all this "underfinancing".
Who prevented the same Mr. Hartov from stating that insufficient funds were allocated for such a large-scale project to be fully implemented. And so it all resembles nothing more than the notorious sabotage or aiding sabotage. And let the terms give some Soviet zamselost, but otherwise the situation in our recent space program is difficult to call. They ate not sabotage, then either experienced bureaucratic “pofigism”, or total incompetence, which is extremely unlikely due to the worldwide fame of the same NGO named after Lavochkin.
It turns out that laxity and hope for insurance have brought our space industry to the point beyond which there is a real vacuum. With such “squandering” of spacecraft, foreign investors will not want to contact us either. It is worth noting that such countries as Germany, Switzerland, China, Sweden, France, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Poland participated in the Phobos-Grunt program (namely, in terms of filling the apparatus with equipment). Will they want to finance new projects of Roscosmos? If they want, with much less enthusiasm.
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