“Rogozin is at it again,” harked a post on Twitter today. Rogozin is of course Dmitry Olegovich Rogozin, the Director General of Roscosmos, Russia’s state corporation for spaceflight activities and systems. “At it” meant that he had given a speech regarding the current state of the Russian space program, its future and its plans. I suppose “at it” was also meant that Rogozin had made sensational sort of statement, something he’s known for from time to time. He didn’t really do that this time, however, instead he gave a frank statement of how his program needs to improve and what his viewpoint of the American space program is.
Rogozin makes some good points, with a touch of the same sort of jingoism Americans were applauding as it came from the Cape and Houston just a couple of weeks ago as NASA and SpaceX sent two astronauts to orbit on the ISS. Write off the Russian space program at your own peril — they are the ones who have uninterrupted access to orbit for over forty years.
He called out NASA spokesperson Stephanie Schierholz, who told Forbes magazine last week that “cosmonauts will fly on Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner and vice versa.” Aside from Schierholz’s statement, there’s no evidence that Russia is planning to fly on either craft — they have purchased no contracts, nor have they publicly submitted any RFP’s for one. Russia has no need to buy seats, as it has a reliable ride to space of its own.
Rogozin also offered a riposte to Elon Musk, when he said “on May 30 Elon Musk did not bring us down — he brought down his compatriots from Boeing passing them with the beginning of the flight tests. This war is theirs, but not ours. We have a long-standing and continuously working national transport system; we constantly refine it, at the same time building a new and more advanced spacecraft.”
What do you expect him to say? Should he fawn like a SpaceX fanboi on Twitter and suggest that the Russians shut down a program that has ~1900 successful launches, 173 crewed? That is absurd. Rogozin is correct, besides. The competition was not with them, it was Boeing vs. SpaceX. Yes, Russia charged NASA far more than SpaceX will, but the Russians were also charging what the market would bear, something that should be near and dear to a country to claims to love the free market and capitalism. The only possible competition would have come from China, a country that NASA is forbidden to work with in any international space effort. It was Russia or America would have had to abandon ISS entirely. Given that stark choice, Russia’s price was a bargain.
Much was also made in the about the vast superiority of Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 versus Soyuz. Certainly Crew Dragon is more modern, after all, its base design is a little more than a decade old. Its crewed flight capabilities are still being tested for the first time — while it is successfully in orbit, that was only one-third of its mission: go to orbit, stay there and test the long-term capabilities of the craft to stay functional and then return the crew safely home. Until it meets the latter two milestones, one underway, the other yet to come later in the summer, the mission cannot be called a success. On the other hand, Soyuz was and still is the most venerable human launch system in existence. It’s record speaks for itself.
“We have a unique record of 173 successful flights. Even the three emergencies caused by the carrier rocket failures in 1975, 1983 and 2018 occurring during various injection stages showed its unique survivability due to the launch escape system reliability. By the way, the Soyuz rocket of various configurations has performed over 1,900 launches,” said Rogozin.
True. Soyuz is, by far, the most experienced and iterated design of any spacecraft, ever. Is it dated? Yes. But it has continued from its maiden launch in the days of Gemini until now. The Soviets/Russians have not had the capability gaps that existed here between Apollo and STS, the delays after STS tragedies, and the last gap between STS and Commercial Crew.
And it will stay that way, because not all nations want to depend on America for access to space. That is why Rogozin mentioned “the time-honored spacecraft created and designed by Sergey Korolev to conquer the Moon, will serve for a while even after the new Oryol spacecraft becomes operational.” In other words, the Russians will continue to have access to space now and for as far as one can peer into the future.