Lenta News Agency Forced to Take Down Damning Report on Deteriorating State of Roskosmos

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 9 – Lenta investigative journalist Vladimir Koryagin prepared a devastating portrait of Roskosmos which spends billions on space but kopecks for the engineering talent that make progress in that or any other sector possible. But the news agency was forced to delete the report, likely because of complaints from above.

            But nothing is ever completely lost on the Internet. A cached copy remains available (webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:P653tQUhkfsJ:https://lenta.ru/articles/2018/12/07/space_xxx/+&cd=1&hl=ru&ct=clnk&gl=ru), and that has been republished in its entirety by the Russian Monitor portal (rusmonitor.com/polet-v-nikuda-rossiya-tratit-milliardy-na-kosmos-i-kopejjki-na-inzhenerov-kuda-ukhodyat-dengi-udalennyjj-material-lenta-ru.html).

            Entitled “A Flight to Nowhere: Russia Spends Billions on Space and Kopecks for Engineers. Where is the Money Going,” Koryagin’s report details the way in which corruption, mismanagement, underfunding, and ignoring the basic requirements for training and especially retaining engineering talent, Russia has lost the advantages it inherited from Soviet times.

            It is launching ever fewer rockets each year, it has fewer and fewer successful satellites, and it seems to worry most of all about keeping the prices of its rockets low to attract some buyers and to maintaining ties with the US so as to get money coming in for Russia’s role in the international space station.

            What it is not doing, Koryagin documents, is training enough new engineers or paying them sufficiently to retain them in the branch. As a result, the skills of people in the branch are declining, its research staff is aging and not being replaced, and the entire system is falling ever further behind other countries and even private corporations now involved in space work. 

            Moscow must decide what it wants more – “to fly into space or to save on the people and scientific research which makes this possible. If it wants to remain a space power,” Koryagin says, it will have to spend more money not just on the branch as a whole but especially on the training of new cadres.

            “The most valuable capital is people,” the journalist concludes, “and cadres decide everything. Therefore, the rocket-space industry must have competent, able and really motivated professionals of all kinds, from workers to the heads of enterprises.” Unless it provides better pay to keep and attract the best of these, “this task is utopian.”