Washington Post runs front-page near-obituary for Russian science
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0218
The 22 December Washington Post front page trumpets the headline “Russia’s fading scientific prospects: Lab output from former pioneer in research is minimal.” A large photo shows why the editors chose the front page. It depicts the 21 December launch of a Soyuz spaceship with a space station crew. Spaceflight engineering may not be science, but the Post sees an overlap and therefore a potential problem for post-shuttle NASA, which depends on Russian access to the International Space Station.
The article observes that Soviet achievements led to nine Nobel Prizes in physics and one in chemistry, but that science in Russia has become “ossified, geriatric, hidebound and hierarchical.” Good minds have left Russia or science itself. Corruption, the article charges, has grown “to staggering proportions,” with scientists complaining “that grant recipients can be expected to kick back a proportion of the money to the bureaucrat who awards the contract.”
The Post quotes Alexander Samokhin at the Institute of General Physics: “Russian science is a replica of the society.” The article sums it up this way: “Russia, in effect, now has two competing scientific systems: the moribund academy living out its Soviet legacy on the one hand, and a new, rotten, post-Soviet culture on the other.”
Here’s the key passage about the implications for NASA:
The recent run of engineering failures in Russia’s space program mirrors the weaknesses of Russian science. The United States has a direct stake in this, because, since the retirement of the U.S. shuttle, Russian rockets now carry American astronauts to the international space station, from a launchpad in Kazakhstan. So far, the manned program has avoided major problems, but the rest of the system has been falling apart.
Over two decades, bad pay, neglect and low prestige emptied out the technicians who would now be in their 40s and 50s. “The losses were tremendous,” says Igor Marinin, editor of the News of Cosmonautics. And the consequences were real.
In November, the Phobus-Grunt probe to one of the Martian moons launched but was unable to leave Earth’s orbit. In August, the Progress cargo spacecraft failed, as did a rocket carrying a communications satellite. A geodesic satellite launch failed in February, and a rocket that was to put in place three satellites of Russia’s geo-positioning system, called Glonass, crashed a year ago. [Russian president Dmitry] Medvedev has called for possible criminal penalties.
Marinin says the manned program is the last bastion of quality control, although in September the chief engineer of the cosmonaut training center was charged in a corruption scheme. The gaps in the Russian space program will take years to restore, even as the government plans to double its spending by 2014.
Sort of makes you feel better about the sometimes frustrating bureaucratic dimensions of American Big Science.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for Science and the Media . He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.