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Russian space industry in the 2010s
Metallurgists at NPO Energomash forging metal for rocket engines circa 2019. Industry shakeup of 2011 At the end of 2010, Russia's already troubled space industry was further shaken by the failure of the Proton rocket sending a trio of GLONASS satellites to crash down into the ocean. This high-profile fiasco attracted the unwanted attention of the government and led to media stories about corruption and nepotism within the Russian space agency. Within a month, the GLONASS accident was followed by the botched launch of the Rockot booster, which left a new-generation Geo-IK-2 military satellite in a useless orbit. It was now clear that heads would roll at Roskosmos. At the beginning of 2011, Russian government officials confirmed old rumors that Anatoly Perminov, who had led Roskosmos since the mid-2000s, would be leaving his post after the celebration of Gagarin's pioneering flight in April. The Kremlin officially announced the removal of Perminov on April 29. Former Deputy Minister of Defense for Armaments, Vladimir Popovkin, was appointed the new chief of Roskosmos. Like Perminov, Popovkin came from the military, a fact which made many veterans of the industry react cynically to the latest reshuffle. According to many critics, the agency, which depends on highly educated personnel and complex technological processes, needed an intelligent technocrat and an experienced administrator at its helm, rather than a commands-barking drill sergeant. According to one source, the military takeover of Roskosmos in the 2000s, made the management of the industry even more backward than it had been during the Soviet period. In the first quarter of 2012, the Russian Ministry of Finance rated Roskosmos as one of the worst among federal agencies in handling its budget. On June 27, 2011, official Russian media reported that the Kremlin had reprimanded Deputy Chief of Roskosmos, Anatoly Shilov for errors, which had prevented the on-time deployment of the Meridian, Kondor and Geo-IK-2 satellites. As it transpired, the official reprimand No. 1025-r was signed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on June 14, 2011. Naturally, this "bloodletting" did nothing to prevent a string of even more spectacular launch failures in August 2011, resulting in the loss of the Ekspress-AM4 communications satellite and the unprecedented crash of a Progress cargo ship heading to the International Space Station. The year of the 50th anniversary of Gagarin's historic flight was concluded with the fiasco of the Phobos-Grunt mission. Advertised as the nation's return to planetary exploration, Phobos-Grunt proved to be another mismanaged project, exactly as insiders had warned. Despite wide-spread knowledge of the project's deficiencies, top Roskosmos officials gave the green light to the doomed launch. In the runup to the disastrous mission, the agency threatened to punish industry employees and to discredit the few independent journalists who had dared to expose mismanagement of Phobos-Grunt and other space projects. From several reliable sources, it is well known that Roskosmos leadership stubbornly insisted on launching a completely unprepared and untested Phobos-Grunt spacecraft in 2009. However at the time, Russian Academy of Sciences and the agency's own TsNIIMash certification center refused to go along with such a suicidal move. However, in 2011, even most influential leaders of the industry were unable to resist the political pressure to launch the ill-fated mission. In a paradox inherited from USSR, it is sometimes more dangerous for Russian space officials to declare the spacecraft not fit for launch than to let it fail in space. Admitting problems before launch could be a career suicide, while problems in orbit, if they do happen, could be always blamed on external factors, such as meteoroids, space junk, secret US experiments, or on scapegoats at the bottom of the industrial food chain, such as computer programmers, welders or propellant-loading technicians. In the meantime, according to sources within the industry, the latest round of purges at Roskosmos was expected to start as soon as November 28, 2011. Although no reshuffle followed at the time, launch failures did. On Aug. 6, 2012, another mishap of the Briz upper stage on the Proton rocket, left Telkom-3 and Ekspress-MD2 satellites in a wrong orbit. A week later (on August 15), official Russian media reported that Vladimir Nesterov, the head of GKNPTs Khrunichev, which builds Proton and Briz vehicles, had resigned his post. (He stayed as Chief Designer of the Angara project until the end of 2014). Increasing wages During 2012, the agency leadership promised to increase lagging salaries in the space industry 1.3 times from 30,000 to 40,000 rubles and improve quality of training at colleagues supplying workforce for space industry. Continuing consolidation Under Popovkin, Roskosmos continued the integration of Russian space enterprises into larger holdings. By 2013, GKNPTs Khrunichev was scheduled to absorb Pilyugin NPTs Avtomatiki and Moscow-based OKB Mars, both building flight control systems. Around the same period, TsSKB Progress was to integrate with NPO Avtomatika in Ekaterinburg and NII Command Devices in St. Petersburg. Previously, TsSKB Progress absorbed its major contractors: NPP Opteks in Zelenograd, which was specialized in telemetry transmission systems and OKB Spektr in Ryazan, developing avionics for remote-sensing satellites. Even much larger company, such as NPO Lavochkin found itself among possible candidates to be absorbed by RKK Energia or ISS Reshetnev. Although the official pretext for such drastic measure was to prepare the industry for a large-scale lunar exploration program or for the development of complex space observatories, the real reason could be Lavochkin's failures in the development of Phobos-Grunt and other projects. (In the end, NPO Lavochkin stayed as a separate entity.) Industrial reorganization Also, during 2012, the TsKB TM design bureau, previously responsible for rocket launching hardware and fortified firing rooms for ICBMs, was reorganized into the Strategic Control Sites Corporation. In addition, Popovkin mandated that positions of Director General and Designer General at the helm of space enterprises were occupied by different officials by the second half of 2013. Traditionally, the same individual would often held both positions for many years. The apparent goal was to enable experienced engineers to take leadership roles as designer generals, while political appointees and non-technical managers would be limited to director positions. According to documents published in March 2012, as many as 77 organizations could see their top management positions split, however the focus would be on "failing" companies, Popovkin was quoted as saying at the time. On June 26, 2013, President Putin signed an order No. 250-rp "On the commission for the structuring of the control system for the rocket and space industry," which appointed Deputy Chair of the Russian government Dmitry Rogozin to lead the reorganization of the rocket industry. The document also required to develop and submit for the approval by the president a plan of actions on the industry reorganization in the 3rd quarter of 2013. Recovery starts? Typically for Russian scientific community and space industry, even sharp increases in funding did not produce visible results. Some observers feared that overwhelming corruption, inefficiency and devastating losses of the 1990s would require decades of new investments before the industry could return to the Soviet level. Still, by 2013, the Russian government hurried to report some progress. On June 28, the Vice Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told the Russian press that production levels in the rocket and space industry had increased by 10.8 percent in 2012, comparing to 2011. During the same period, electronics industry increased its output by 11.7 percent and aviation industry by 10.6 percent. Roskosmos faces another management shakeup On October 7, 2013, Russian media started the week with a flurry of unconfirmed reports about the inevitable replacement of the Russian space agency head Vladimir Popovkin. According to the Izvestiya daily, the Deputy Defense Minister Oleg Ostapenko would be appointed the new boss at the agency. In turn, Popovkin was reportedly offered a position of the presidential adviser on space activities. In the meantime, the Kommersant daily reported that the Director General of the AvtoVAZ automobile firm Igor Komarov could lead the newly formed United Rocket and Space Corporation, ORKK, which would consolidate the Russian rocket and space industry following its planned reorganization. According to a posting on the online forum of the Novosti Kosmonavtiki magazine, the Russian space agency, Roskosmos, was expected to emerge from the latest round of reforms with significantly diminished responsibilities, (likely giving real powers within the industry to the head of ORKK). On October 10, just 24 hours after publishing denials from Roskosmos, official Russian media finally confirmed the change at the helm of the agency. The Ukrainian fallout The Russian-Ukrainian conflict of 2014 had a profound effect on space industry in both former Soviet republics. Obviously, the Ukrainian space industry, which had been heavily dependent on Russian orders since the days of the Soviet collapse in 1991, would be worst affected. However, there would be a cost for Russia too. First, Europe threatened with sanctions on many sensitive technologies such as electronics in response to Russian actions in Ukraine. Also, immediately after coming to power in Kiev, a newly elected president of Ukraine Petr Poroshenko ordered to end any military cooperation of Ukrainian entities with Russia. As a result, Russia had to begin a costly effort to replace Ukrainian and Western components in its space program. Some of the imported hardware turned out to be not as complex as could be imagined. For example, more than a billion rubles had to be allocated for organizing production of four types of titanium tanks at the Voronezh Mechanical Plant. Tanks designed to contain highly pressurized helium gas are used by pneumatic systems of rocket engines on such rockets as Proton, Angara and Briz upper stage. As it turned out, they had been manufactured exclusively by a Yuzhmash production plant in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. 2015: Yet another restructuring The Russian space agency, Roskosmos, suffered another failure to launch, fortunately, only at the bureaucratic level. On Jan. 21, 2015, the Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev issued an Order No. 59-r relieving Oleg Ostapenko from his position as the head of Roskosmos after only 15 months on the post. The move also scrapped a bloated industry structure, which aimed to turn Roskosmos into a state-run customer for the space industry. Instead, the ill-fated attempt to reform the industry pushed the agency's management into a turf war with the newly created United Rocket and Space Corporation, ORKK. Most of 2014 was lost in costly political battles between two redundant bureaucracies for control over various entities and responsibilities, while the space industry as a whole had continued its downward slide. By the end of 2014, the Russian government had enough and essentially sided with ORKK. The latest change created Roskosmos State Corporation under a single leadership of the ORKK head Igor Komarov. It marked the third dismissal at the helm of Roskosmos in four years and put a civilian in charge of space industry after almost a decade and a half under the leadership of military officials. However, unlike practically all past and present leaders of the Russian space program, Komarov came from the automotive industry and had no prior experience in the space field. At the time, the new Roskosmos State Corporation was expected to be comprised of eight holdings specialized in various fields of rocketry and space flight, including:
Such a division of responsibilities is built along the lines of traditional specialization among key companies within the Russian space industry. The system was largely inherited from the Soviet period. The latest industry reshuffle was backdropped by the worsening economic situation in Russia and resulting efforts by the Kremlin to reevaluate the nation's present and future space activities in order to cut costs. At the end of January 2015, Komarov said that despite worsening economic situation, an effort would be made to preserve all key projects and limit the effect from funding cuts only to schedules. On July 13, 2015, President Putin signed a federal law governing the Roskosmos State Corporation. Borisov replaces Rogozin as Deputy Prime Minister for defense and space industry On May 7, 2018, the official Russian media announced a reshuffle of the Russian government, coinciding with the beginning of another presidential term. The new members of Putin's cabinet included former Deputy Minister of Defense Yuri Borisov, who would now be responsible for overseeing the nation's military industrial complex encompassing the rocket and space industry. In the chair of Vice Prime Minister, Borisov replaced Dmitry Rogozin. Management reshuffle at the Soyuz rocket manufacturer On June 26, 2018, the Board of Directors at RKTs Progress appointed Dmitry Baranov the new Interim Director at the company. Based in the city of Samara, RKTs Progress manufactures the Soyuz rocket series and develops various Russian military and application satellites, among them Persona, Bars-M, Bion and Foton. The announcement of Baranov's appointment as the Interim Director was published on the company's web site on June 29, even though a day earlier, the Head of Roskosmos Dmitry Rogozin had announced that Baranov had been appointed Director General. Baranov, who joined RKTs Progress in 1993, in his previous capacity oversaw launch vehicle projects at RKTs Progress, including upgrades to the Soyuz-2 variants and the development of the next-generation Soyuz-5 rocket. In his new position, Baranov replaced his former boss Aleksandr Kirilin, who had led the company since 1993 but was temporarily removed from his post in February in connection with embezzlement charges. Kirilin's deputy Ravil Akhmetov led RKTs Progress in the interim and will continue working at the company as Designer General, according to Rogozin. In November 2016, the Russian press reported that authorities had charged Chief Engineer at RKTs Progress Sergei Tyulevin and the head of financial services Svetlana Kirilina, daughter of Aleksandr Kirilin, with inflating the cost of various defense contracts by a total of almost one billion rubles ($15.8 million) and appropriating these funds. The contracts worth a total of 10 billion rubles ($158 million) were awarded for the upgrades of tooling and machinery at RKTs Progress within the defense modernization program. According to prosecution sources quoted by LiFE publication, in 2014 and 2015, Tyulevin and Kirilina channeled funds for the purchases of foreign equipment to their own coffers using front companies under their control. Kirilina was accused of appropriating 309 million rubles ($4.8 million), LiFE said. On February 13, 2018, Kirilin himself faced charges that between November 2012 and December 2016, RKTs Progress paid SoyuzObsheMashImport LLC 11.784 million Euro for the supply of a hydraulic press, while, according to the procurement contract, the company only spent 9.783 million Euro for the machine. According to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, by February 2018, the prosecution had filed criminal charges against four top managers at RKTs Progress. In February and March, RIA Novosti news agency reported that Kirilin had appealed the decision to remove him from office but without success. On Nov. 19, 2018, a meeting of Directors' Council at RKTs Progress elected Dmitry Baranov the Director General of the company. Satellite development consolidation In an interview with the Rossiya-24 TV channel on March 22, 2019, Head of Roskosmos Dmitry Rogozin said five Russian satellite development firms would be consolidated into two or three companies to avoid unnecessary competition and duplication. Rogozin did not identify what companies he had counted among those five organizations.
Geography and official statistics of the rocket and space industry in Russia released by Roskosmos on May 23, 2019.
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