Space industry - an alternative view

I do not like holivarny themes: they have little truth and little joy. But the last topic caused a storm of emotions in me. I myself and many of my friends are somehow connected with our space industry and I can say that everything is a little different.



In short, our situation is difficult, but they are no better either, if not worse. (This applies to European and American structures, I don’t know about the others.)



So, our problems:

• Financing. Everyone has heard about the GLONASS scandal. But I just have the impression that the percentage of 80%, if not all 100% of the “stolen” funds went into the industry. Maybe I'm wrong, but in conversations many employees are paid decent wages only thanks to this trough. (Yes, I am aware that further project managers will pay kickbacks, but the point is not the point).
  
  
• Disrupted production cycle: R & D has to be carried out as soon as possible during R & D and at the same time no one is ready for a negative result (that is, when according to R & D results, it turns out that the problem is not solved). Along the way, this also follows from the principles of financing the industry.
  
  

And now for the general ones:

• Stop the development at the level of the late 80s, that we have, then they have. So one example: the period of separation of the upper stage and is not controlled before the satellite enters the target orbit, and it’s unrealistic to do this at all with modern ground-based means. If you look, then almost all the recent accidents are associated with this stage. In Europe and the USA, this is solved due to a significant number of tests and an excess of reliability, i.e. in money. + they run less of ours.
• Degradation of personnel. What we have (everything is clear), that they have. World-famous 20 years ago, laboratories capable of building an interferometer for a space telescope ultimately fail the task, but something new is not visible.
• The race of quantitative indicators. Which led to the fact that the serious problems that have arisen over the past 15 years, which require radically different solutions, are ignored and any attempt to solve them rests on the lack of funding.
• In the manuals, the lion's share is occupied by accountants and “effective managers”, who have little understanding of where logic and methods of the world can be applied.
  
  

In defense:

• About the military. The military is a specific type of people who know how to restore order. And I have repeatedly observed how the military should briefly plunge into the work of the team, so the level of adequacy of his behavior increased by orders of magnitude, but as soon as he returned to the “world of accountants”, everything returned to normal. I also observed what order the military can bring where it does not come into contact with accountants and is occupied only by the team that is assigned to it. This creates a strong and positive impression: a little engineer or IT-person is capable of it.
• The highest leadership of our space industry: Rogozin and Povetkin are quite adequate people who understand the subject (themselves or thanks to their assistants is not important). The Angara launch vehicle, Vostochny cosmodrome, GLONASS, ISSS cosmodrome is very, very important for maintaining the industry, but oh, how little.