The Rake's Progress

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The Rake's Progress was a tale of decline and fall which seems to be the fate of  Russia's space programme after a series of recent disasters, reported in this piece from The Times.

Putin’s space dream dragged into £1bn black hole


A series of accidents has dented the high reputation of Russia’s rockets Getty Images


By Ben Hoyle - The Times

President Putin’s dream of restoring Russia’s space programme to its Soviet-era glory has suffered a fresh blow after state auditors uncovered more than £1 billion worth of financial irregularities at the national space agency last year.

The embarrassing revelation comes hard on the heels of back-to-back rocket launch failures that have shaken international faith in Russia’s space industry and placed billions of dollars in commercial contracts in jeopardy.

Tatyana Golikova, head of Russia’s Audit Chamber, said that she had been surprised by the size of the irregularities at Roscosmos.

“At first I didn’t believe my inspectors, because the value of the financial violations identified was 92 billion roubles [£1.2 billion],” she said. “For me this was an absolute surprise. “

However when she compared the spending figures for 2013 and 2014 “the number of violations had increased dramatically”. They include inefficient use of funds, misuse of appropriated funds and violations in fiscal reporting methods, she said. The Audit Chamber has not published detailed findings but many of the irregularities relate to the troubled ongoing construction of a big new space centre in Russia’s far east.

The Vostochny (“Eastern”) Cosmodrome in the remote Amur region will gradually replace the even bigger Soviet-era Baikonur space centre which, inconveniently for Russia, is inside Kazakhstan. Moscow leases the territory back from Kazakhstan.

The complex will accommodate 30,000 people, an airport, train station, hotels, parks, schools, a business centre and a site for training cosmonauts and space tourists. In the coming years Russia aims to build a permanent moon base and put a man on Mars.

The Vostochny Cosmodrome is expected to host its first rocket launch in December this year but the project has been dogged by delays and problems.

Last September Mr Putin pledged an extra £650 million to hasten the completion and in October the head of the main contractor on the project was arrested for stealing roughly £23 million of state funds. By April workers building the plant were on hunger strike over unpaid wages and 20 criminal cases involving 228 officials were under way.

Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister responsible for the defence and space industries, said that not all of the 92 billion roubles had been stolen but “some figures indicate that fraud and theft were involved”.

Discussing the technical problems, he said: “Unfortunately reforms in the space sector were only started 18 months ago.” He said that Roscosmos “still has staff at its design bases standing by drawing boards with pencils in their hands” when rockets should be being built with digital models.

He previously blamed a succession of crashes and failures on the moral failure of the “leadership” of the space programme. Russia currently holds a dominant position in the global satellite launch market, with an estimated 40 per cent share, but this could wither away if the recent trend of failures continues and leads to a loss of confidence in Russian launches, experts say. Russia’s Soyuz aircraft is the only means of transporting astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).

Russia has two main vehicles: the Proton rocket, used for commercial satellites, and the Progress space craft, for ISS supply missions. The Proton, long considered reliable, has now crashed seven times in five years, most recently this month. A Progress space craft also crashed this month, meaning that both are now out of service pending crash investigations.

“You can compare it to the fall of the Roman Empire,” Pavel Luzin, a space industry analyst said last week. “The Russian space industry is collapsing.”

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