It was strange position to take, especially given that he grants that Russia’s budgetary shortfall has forced the space agency to take “risky technological solutions,” which seems a rather more likely explanation for asplodin’ rockets. He believed that someone was tampering with Russia’s spacecraft - the one out of five that managed to reach orbit, anyway - at portions of their orbital flight paths that take them out of observation range of Russian ground stations. “I wouldn’t like to accuse anyone, but today there exist powerful means allowing to influence spacecraft, and their use can’t be excluded,” he said last month. In January, he offered his thoughts as to what had gone wrong: Foreigners were sabotaging Russia. Vladimir Popovkin, the Russian space czar, hasn’t exactly taken these failures to heart. The real problem with the Russian space program these days isn’t necessarily that they had a bad year. It’s no surprise that things go badly, and the Russians could have just been experiencing a losing streak. The very first step requires successfully setting off a giant amount of fuel in a massive controlled explosion which blasts a slender metal tube several hundred kilometres up into the sky, and if you miss your mark by anything but the tiniest fraction in space or speed, the mission is a dud. But not, all things considered, particularly surprising.
That’s five high-profile failures in one year.
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