Reviewing Russia’s space strategy

Last year was exceptionally difficult for the Russian space sector. Undisputed achievements were marred by a higher-than-normal number of embarrassing failures. Formally, Russia preserved its global leadership in the number of space launches (32, or 38% of the overall number of launches worldwide), but simultaneously set a worrying record with five launch failures.

The 2011 successes included the orbiting of the Elektro-L geostationary meteorological satellite and the Radioastron (Spektr-R) radio telescope. Another major achievement was to complete the deployment of the Glonass constellation of navigation satellites to a global coverage capacity. Last year also saw the start of the Russian-EU project Soyuz at Kourou with the first two launches of Russian rockets from the ESA-operated equatorial spaceport.

However these successes were eclipsed by a string of mishaps. The Geo-IK2 geodesy satellite and the Express-AM4 communications satellite were both placed into wrong orbit. The Progress M-12M resupply ship was lost in a launch failure on August 24. On November 9, the Phobos-Grunt probe — Russia’s first interplanetary mission in decades — found itself stranded in low Earth orbit. All attempts to reactivate the craft were to no avail. The probe burned on re-entry in mid-January 2012. Finally, on December 23, 2011 a third-stage engine failure at launch resulted in the loss of the Meridian 5 military communications satellite. Furthermore, the dates for many other Russian space launches were missed throughout the year.