BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan: From rocket-shaped playground equipment to faded murals of cosmonauts, mementos of the heyday of Soviet space exploration are scattered around this sandswept town that launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961.
When President Vladimir Putin described the space port on the remote Kazakh steppe as “physically aged” in April, he could have been speaking about Russia’s space industry itself.
In Baikonur as elsewhere, the once-pioneering sector is struggling to live up to its legacy, end an embarrassing series of botched launches, modernise decaying infrastructure and bring in new blood and new ideas.
Putin hopes a sweeping reform he signed off this month will not come too late to turn the industry around — part of a push to make Russia a high-technology superpower by salvaging leading Cold War-era industries and research centres.
Built far from prying eyes in a desert-like flatland in central Asia, the once-secret launch site of Sputnik and the first man in space lives on in a strange limbo, marooned in western Kazakhstan by the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Today, it is the only gateway for manned flights to the International Space Station, hosting astronauts from the world, and the site of about one-third of all satellite launches.
But Baikonur has no movie theatre — let alone many of the trappings of the 21st century. Camels graze the barren steppes near rocket launch sites, and what little seems to have changed since Soviet times often looks the worse for it.
“Visitors expect a city of steel and glass like in science fiction films, but for a long time no one even knew this place existed,” said Evelina Shchur, director of the space museum in a city she describes as “provincial”.
Despite bigger budgets and Putin’s pledge to revive the sector, Russia’s space industry has been in crisis for years.
“The whole industry needs to be overhauled because the old doesn’t work and the new hasn’t been built,” said Igor Marinin, editor of the spaceflight journal Novosti Kosmonavtiki.
By separating space agency Roskosmos from its contractors, the Kremlin hopes the reform will boost quality control and end a calamitous series of blunders like July’s crash of a Proton rocket carrying a $200m payload.
“We have big plans,” the new Roskosmos chief, Oleg Ostapenko, told Reuters last month. “We will do everything possible to get rid of the black marks on our reputation.”
The reform also aims to streamline production by uniting suppliers into a new state-run firm.
Roskosmos will be left in charge only of policy, research and ground infrastructure such as the Baikonur cosmodrome.
“It will be very difficult, but the Kremlin realises it can’t keep living the old way,” said Sergey Pekhterev, head of Russian sat-com firm SetTelecom. “The latest Proton accident showed the inexplicable degree of degradation in the sector.”
The United Rocket and Space Corporation is to be created by mid-April on the grounds of a space research institute, and officials say the restructuring will cost nothing extra. An experienced plant manager, the former head of car-maker Avtovaz , Igor Komarov, 49, has been tapped to lead it.
Critics of the plan say it will eliminate competition and that the shake-up may bring more confusion to the industry, but many insiders say reform is long overdue.
“The industry has been stagnant, it’s been rotting, there were big problems, but now a path has been decided on to fix them,” Marinin said. REUTERS
