Russia announces revised schedule for its lunar unmanned projects
NPO Lavochkin, the Roscosmos division that builds Russia’s lunar landers, has now announced a revised schedule for all of that country’s proposed lunar unmanned projects, following the failure of its Luna-25 lander in August.
The program calls for at least six missions, including orbiters, landers, and a rover, launching from 2027 through the 2030s. However, this quote from the article is the reality:
As often before, the latest strategy relied on the development time frames that had never been demonstrated by NPO Lavochkin in comparable projects in the past three decades.
What is worse is the 100% failure record of Lavochkin’s planetary probes once launched. It takes forever to build anything, and then what it builds and launches doesn’t work.
Not that this absimal record will cost Lavochkin anything. The Russian government and the bureaucracy that controls it does not allow any competition. Instead, like prohibition-era mobsters, divisions like Lavochkin carve up territories that they control, and allow no one else in. For example, Lavochkin owns planetary research while Energia, another division in Roscosmos, controls manned space flight as well as its launch industry. No one else is allowed it enter these markets, which means Lavochkin can fail repeatedly for the next century and nothing will change.
NPO Lavochkin, the Roscosmos division that builds Russia’s lunar landers, has now announced a revised schedule for all of that country’s proposed lunar unmanned projects, following the failure of its Luna-25 lander in August.
The program calls for at least six missions, including orbiters, landers, and a rover, launching from 2027 through the 2030s. However, this quote from the article is the reality:
As often before, the latest strategy relied on the development time frames that had never been demonstrated by NPO Lavochkin in comparable projects in the past three decades.
What is worse is the 100% failure record of Lavochkin’s planetary probes once launched. It takes forever to build anything, and then what it builds and launches doesn’t work.
Not that this absimal record will cost Lavochkin anything. The Russian government and the bureaucracy that controls it does not allow any competition. Instead, like prohibition-era mobsters, divisions like Lavochkin carve up territories that they control, and allow no one else in. For example, Lavochkin owns planetary research while Energia, another division in Roscosmos, controls manned space flight as well as its launch industry. No one else is allowed it enter these markets, which means Lavochkin can fail repeatedly for the next century and nothing will change.
