The decision to restructure it has already been made and will be announced in the near future
“Something seems to be going wrong,” the federal news anchor said as he watched the Proton-M launch vehicle fly flat on the air. The spectacular footage of the catastrophe drew the attention of the management and the public to the Russian space industry and made them urgently look for an answer to the question of what exactly was going wrong in it.
Although for specialists and analysts, it has long been known. “Systemic crisis” is a phrase used by most of them when it comes to the state of affairs in Russian cosmonautics. This is undoubtedly a fair definition, but nevertheless, in my opinion, accents should be highlighted.
People…
The crisis in the space industry is primarily a personnel crisis. Formally, there are no problems with personnel: officially, the space industry currently employs 244 thousand people - more than anyone else in the world. However, firstly, among these employees there are extremely few people of the middle, most productive age. Either old people or young people who have no experience work at the enterprises. Secondly, such a large number of employees is primarily a consequence of extremely low labor productivity. The Russian economy in general and industry in particular are less efficient than those in Europe and the United States. However, no other industry has such a gap between Russia and the Western countries in terms of output per employee as in the space industry. For reference: the headcount of the European leader in the production of space satellites, Thales Alenia Space, is about 7.5 thousand. Its annual turnover in 2012 is about 2.1 billion euros - an amount that is almost half of the total turnover of all enterprises of the Russian space industry taken together, which, I recall, is generated, according to official data, by a quarter of a million people. Another example is the American private company SpaceX. The entire cycle of work, including the development and construction of the Falcon family of launch vehicles and Dragon spacecraft, is carried out by a staff of about 1,800. For comparison: the Russian FSUE GKNPTs named after M. V. 43.5 thousand employees. Low labor productivity, in turn, is a key reason for the persistent low wages in the Russian space industry - too many consumers have to share the pie of government orders, and it is difficult to compete in the international market. The consequence of low salaries is naturally the exodus of the best personnel from the industry. Most of the representatives of foreign companies I know that cooperate with enterprises of the space industry in Russia, without saying a word, call the most advanced and competitive Russian enterprise in the industry in the world market, JSC Information Satellite Systems named after Academician MF Reshetnev. Why? It's just that the Zheleznogorsk residents, due to their remoteness from the center and the low average standard of living in their region, have retained most of their human resources. Of our other leading enterprises based in Moscow, Korolev near Moscow and St. Petersburg, the more rapidly developing sectors of the economy of the two capitals simply sucked the best personnel. There are only a few convinced astronautics fanatics, or people whose working qualities do not allow them to find a high-paying job.
… and structure
The solution to the personnel problem is impossible without the consolidation of the space industry and a serious reduction in both the number of enterprises and the number of their personnel. This is obvious to the leadership of Roskosmos, and the federal agency defended the idea of creating a state corporation on its basis by analogy with Rosatom and transferring state-owned assets to its management. Such a step would make it possible to carry out the necessary reductions, improve the manageability of the industry and, as a result, increase both labor productivity and the quality of products. However, on the path of reform was the resistance of enterprises that did not want to part with their independence. The current situation is very convenient for them - living on government orders, they essentially exist in a non-competitive environment and the issue of production efficiency and product quality is secondary for them, and the responsibility for failures lies primarily with Roskosmos. In addition, local authorities are opposed to cuts at enterprises, fearing the loss of a reliable electorate.
Coming reform
The current head of Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin, has a number of bold and necessary decisions that his predecessors did not dare to make. Shortly after his appointment, he launched a campaign to identify misappropriation of funds. Roscosmos commissions were sent to many enterprises in the industry to conduct unscheduled inspections. This was followed by a series of resignations of heads of industry enterprises. By the decision of Popovkin in October 2011, the openly "sawing" project of creating a family of carrier rockets "Rus-M", which was supposed to replace the "Soyuz", was stopped. Opponents of the head of Roscosmos blame him for this decision, recalling that the state spent over 1.5 billion rubles on the development of Rus-M. At the same time, it is somehow forgotten that in this way the waste of budgetary funds on the design of a rocket with an incomprehensible future, which does not have any obvious advantages over the modernized Soyuz, was stopped and which most likely would never have flown anywhere. Several more corruption troughs were covered. In response, the heads of large enterprises in the space industry began a real information war against the head of Roscosmos, which has been going on for two years with short interruptions. They failed to achieve success - the political leadership of the country demonstrated that Popovkin had a sufficient reserve of trust. However, the head of Roscosmos did not have enough hardware weight to launch a project for a large-scale reform of the industry. Hope for a change in the situation was introduced in April of this year by President Putin, who suggested that the government consider the creation of a space ministry. This is how the space industry was organized in the USSR - its enterprises were subordinate to the Ministry of General Machine Building. Apparently, the disaster of Proton-M that followed in July, caused by production negligence, aggravated by the missile's design flaw in the form of a lack of "foolproof protection", strengthened the country's leadership in the need to restructure the industry. On the sidelines of the space department, there are rumors that the decision has already been made and will be announced in the near future.
New Russian space
The restructuring of the industry will inevitably be accompanied by a revision of the Federal Space Program. Obviously, they will continue the trend started by Roscosmos to make the program more pragmatic. A reduction in the share of spending on manned space exploration, which has a near-zero economic effect, will be accompanied by an increase in spending on launching satellites required by the Russian economy. This is in full accord with global trends: the European Space Agency, for example, does not have its own manned programs at all - and nothing, they do not consider themselves flawed. As part of the implementation of this concept, a new Russian remote sensing satellite Resurs-P was launched in June 2013. By 2015, Roskosmos plans to increase the number of such devices to 16 and provide Russian companies in the cartographic industry with domestic images by 60 percent (now less than 10 percent). Also, in the coming years, it is planned to significantly increase the number of communication satellites, to supplement the constellation of satellites of the global navigation system with modernized Glonass-K satellites. In addition, expanding participation in international space programs has become an important component of the Roscosmos strategy. In March this year, the heads of the Russian and European space agencies Vladimir Popovkin and Jean-Jacques Dorin signed an Agreement on cooperation in the exploration of Mars and other bodies of the solar system by robotic means. Military and research space exploration has not been forgotten. The build-up of the group is also continuing in the interests of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation - in June of this year, new optical-electronic reconnaissance satellites "Condor" and "Kosmos-2486" were launched. In the coming years, Spectra will be added to the already operating Spektr-R radio telescope for studying outer space in the X-ray and ultraviolet ranges. Finally, over the past couple of years, work on the construction of the Russian Vostochny cosmodrome and the creation of a new carrier rocket "Angara", which should replace the ill-fated "Protons", have significantly intensified. All the steps taken allow us to hope that the domestic cosmonautics will successfully survive the current difficult period and Russia will retain its position in the list of leading space powers.
