The latest bitter joke circulating in Moscow is that its ill-fated lunar probe Luna-25 broke into pieces after mysteriously falling through a 10th-floor window of the Luna Hilton. Other even less humorous jokes invoke deadly impacts from invisible meteorites or speculate when Putin will “find out” he was sabotaged. But anyone familiar with Russian culture recognizes its classic coping mechanism for dealing with disappointment decade after decade.
Some Internet messages resort to reciting the classic litany of early Soviet first spaceflights: in orbit, with animals and then people, beyond orbit to the moon, in those briefly glorious years when the mishaps of the U.S. they were derided as “kaputniks” and “flopniks”. But as gardeners will tell you, nothing ruins laurels as quickly as someone resting on them.
The fundamental differences between this Soviet-era space program and today’s distant dim shadow are often overlooked in the appeals of nostalgia. The original program had the highest priority in Moscow, with full funding, full staff of the brightest graduates from the best universities and technical schools, full access to high-quality components, both home-built and smuggled in from abroad . It attracted dedicated experts first with its noble aims and the glory of its achievements, then with rare access to special hospitals and shops, the use of special holiday resorts and exemption from compulsory military service.
None of these factors are remotely valid for today’s Russian space industry. Salaries are pitiful. Bright university graduates go into banking or international trade. Easy access to foreign-made electronics has been strangled. As for exemption from military service, no one knows how many, even of the current workforce, have been drafted into the Ukrainian war.
So the astonishing half-century gap in Russia’s take on the moon again with Luna-25 had enormous personnel and logistical and even leadership challenges. The passing decades had made it clear that the resumption of reliable lunar exploration was increasingly difficult for a number of reasons, some obvious and some subtle.
The new mission, Luna-25, was not, as widely billed, a resumption of the decades-long suspended Russian lunar exploration program. It was a repeat of his simpler (but richer), bespectacled, shoe-budget early years. Perhaps the key factor that atrophied the most was the team’s judgment, the ability to anticipate, recognize and respond to the inevitable technical problems that were guaranteed.
As for research space missions beyond low Earth orbit, over the past three decades you could have counted the number of successful Russian lunar and planetary missions on your bare fingers: zero. This means that an entire generation of spaceflight engineers and scientists has retired or died at their desks without passing on to their successors the judgment and practiced knowledge needed to minimize reliability threats to these missions. Any new equipment will have to go through the learning curve again by trial and error.
Russian culture makes the problem even worse. In the good old days, their spaceflight teams emphasized training in terms of learning, where guys would follow the old guys around for five or ten years to pick up their unwritten rules. However, as a matter of job security, experienced workers did not openly document their own hard-won insights, except in personal notebooks, often with their own codes.
That is, they deliberately made themselves irreplaceable, which wouldn’t have been a problem if they had also been made immortal. In the real world, however, in a Russia where decades of retreat from space exploration provided little experience and useful job instincts, this left replacement cadres with underpaid and inexperienced personnel. It may already be too late even to expect a rapid return to the levels of aerospace industrial competition of the 1980s.
Shortly before his death in 2017, veteran cosmonaut Georgy Grechko spoke to the Interfax news agency about a recent string of Russian space science mission failures. He said, according to a translation, that space hardware is “precision technology bordering on fine art, but young people are not being trained and old people are leaving.” He explained: “The scary thing is that in 20 years, everything was ruined, so now whatever they do, whatever they pay to save it, nothing will be achieved in 20 days… You need at least 10 years . to rebuild everything”.
He continued: “Employed staff are over 60 or under 30. There is no intermediate age group. A generation was lost to the space industry, when it was struggling to survive.” He explained what he saw as the crucial problem: “People, mostly young, energetic and talented, would look elsewhere for higher incomes. The space industry I couldn’t offer them any decent wages.” A large portion of the space workforce came to be made up of “legacy” enthusiasts who just wanted to follow in their parents’ footsteps, whatever their personal skill level.
Even in the 1990s, Americans were working with Russian colleagues on Shuttle–look missions realized that the “corporate memory” of the Russian spaceflight design and operations team was terribly shallow. Major accidents (such as in-flight cabin fires on space stations) were not documented in the excruciatingly detailed “lessons learned” style favored by NASA, but were merely part of the oral lore of the gossip of older workers. old ones
An alarming example: During a 1996 briefing in Houston by Russian flight veteran Jean-Loup Chretien of France (which I attended), the topic of fire hazards came up. Official safety documents sent by Moscow to NASA listed the failures during the flight as “none”. When challenged, Chretien shrugged and said it was just the Russian style: “After all, all fires were easy to put out.” Jaws dropped around the table.
A year later, a serious fire on board look it nearly killed all six men on board, including an American crewman and a German. NASA’s press release was titled “Small Fire Put Out on Mir” and, in keeping with the Russian approach to learning from its disasters, NASA Director Dan Goldin outright lied to Congress about the severity of the event.
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Russian space analyst Vitaly Egorov recently told Reuters that the purpose of Luna-25 was not just to study the moon but rather to be a political statement. “The goal is political competition between two superpowers, China and the United States, and a number of other countries that also want to claim the title of space superpower,” he said.
“Foreign electronics are lighter, domestic electronics are heavier,” Egorov told Reuters. “While scientists may be tasked with studying lunar water, for Roscosmos the main task is simply to land on the Moon: to recover the lost Soviet experience and learn how to perform this task in a new era.”
In light of the Luna-25 debacle, this goal is even more crucial if the new Russian space program is to have a credible future.
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