Rogozin Has Nice Things to Say About Crew Dragon, Musk

Yes, question marks abound over their entire space program

Looking into Russia’s future, they’re going to come to the decision whether to do with Soyuz what we did with Shuttle. Retire Soyuz to have cash on hand to develop something next. Their best and most affordable bet will be to buy rides on Dragon 2 while whatever comes next is developed. Why waste money going with Boeing when I’m sure the ride with them will be much more expensive.

The Russians are putting themselves more and more into a corner with unrealistic ‘ways out’. At some point they’ll have to either give up on manned spaceflight or make a real world compromise. By the time they have to make their decision, Space X will be flying customers on Crew Dragons for some time. Boeing maybe too. Those options will be just sitting there, and from their POV they’ll be in the moral clear to do it, since the Americans outsourced while ‘they’ reconstituted their manned program.

Knowing the Russians they will just get NASA to pay for the seats in exchange for supporting the Gateway or some activity needed to keep the ISS in orbit. That is the basic problem with these international space ventures, Uncle Sam is expected to pay most of the bills…

The plan has long been that, once the CC vehicles start carrying people, we would take a Russkie up on every one of our crew vehicles and the Russkies would do likewise with one of ours on every Soyuz – with no money going in either direction. So far as I know, that’s still the official NASA plan.

I, personally, would rather that no Americans ever again ride a rickety rattletrap Russkie rocket. And I’m not only not opposed to hauling up Russkies on our ships, I think we should make the offer to do so, without any “barter” required. If the Russkies don’t want to take us up on that offer – given the strong implication of space mendicancy it would carry – I’m fine with that too.

But Soyuz is the least expensive and most reliable – even with recent failures – rocket the Russkies have left. Frankly, killing Angara and Soyuz 2 and concentrating on improving the legacy Soyuz’s quality of build would be the best and cheapest approach the Russkies could take to maintaining a toehold on manned space activity. The Russkies simply haven’t the money even to finish what development programs they still have on their plate, never mind starting anything new.

Long-term, there is no “way out” for Russia. It’s a country in terminal decline and the rate of decay of its space program is exceeding the general rate of decay of the country as a whole. Much of the foreign money keeping their space program even fitfully in play has already gone away, another large chunk is due to disappear quite shortly and most of the rest will follow in about three more years.

The best the Russkies can do is try to make the existing Soyuz system more reliable. All their other efforts seemed doomed to failure or debilitating schedule stretch-outs that amount to the same thing in slow motion. “Reconstituting” its manned program is simply not a realistic option. I expect Russian manned space activity to effectively end with the decommissioning of ISS, whenever that takes place.

Sadly, you may prove correct about that. We need to cut off the NASA welfare checks to Russia, but old habits are often hard to break.

When financing the Sochi Winter Olympics the news was that Putin “shook down” some of the oligarchs for cash. If no money was forthcoming, he’d set the FSB on ’em. Or so the story went, who knows what really goes on over there, but the global sporting event did take place. Somebody paid for it. I would speculate that the funds for a Russian next-gen spacecraft in a similar manner will become available.

I too dislike the Russian regime (and try to disassociate those few tyrants from the rest of the populace – the working stiffs who need to earn a living) but sooner or later they’ll get something flying cosmonauts that’s not named Soyuz.

Russia is cyclic WRT their leadership style. As their population shrinks they’ll become a more unique country from the point of view of resources per capita. At some point Russia will try homesteading their own nation. Their capability of playing that game is considerable and the more they dive into economic ruin with their current model, the more compelling pioneering their own vast land holdings will become.

I think you might have an idea of a way out there, although it is a multiple decade instead of a change in management time frame. If people can get out and homestead, it might be possible to get a percent of the population that is used to individualism that is not part of the state. The way I see it, the problems Russia faces are deep seated throughout the population. Not bad people, but people influenced by bad memes.

For a parallel in the US, look at the poisonous attitude fostered by shady ambulance chasing lawyers. (I know they don’t actually, but the result is the same) If there wasn’t a substantial population looking for a quick buck regardless of morality, there would be no work for the shady ones. As it is, the “sue the bastards” meme causes considerable damage to everyone in this country. Changing insurance commissioners wouldn’t eliminate the poison because it is too wide spread.

That is a portion of the way I view the problems in Russia. A lot of people have learned to not trust management while at the same time working the system as best they can. It would take new management decades to work through the ingrained attitudes.

It is still possible that some limited sectors might be able to insulate to some degree. The brains and talent are there, it is the trust and motivation that I see as an issue. Even limited resources can go a long way when well handled.

That’s because doing so would:

1) Constitute an implied admission that they actually have problems.

2) Constitute an implied admission that they are not actually an especially consequential nation anent space anymore. Actual space-consequential nations, like the U.S., China, India, Japan and the nations of ESA, can do new things in space. They don’t have to settle for just patching their hand-me-downs.

Russia isn’t “cyclic” at all anent their “leadership” style – it’s been tyranny after tyranny for the last thousand years. All Russia’s rapidly shrinking population is going to buy is an earlier end to delusions of being able to keep all that sparsely-populated, resource-rich land in Siberia.

Russia won’t “homestead” it – Russians have been trained for the last millennium to be nervous depressives who avoid initiative like the plague.

If the then-Russian tyrant is smart three or four decades hence, he’ll do what the Czar did in 1867 – sell off an “asset” it cannot take useful advantage of to some other nation that can – that would be post-PRC China – in return for much-needed cash.

If the then-Russian tyrant is a belligerent, short-sighted fool in the Putin mold, he’ll try to hang onto Siberia after the Chinese quit making nice offers and start issuing ultimatums instead. Then he’ll lose it anyway in a short, nasty little war that will further diminish the Russian population and leave it a small European rump – assuming the Chinese don’t simply occupy and annex the whole place out of pique.

American business isn’t nearly so credulous where China is concerned as it once was. That’s especially so now that Trump has largely fixed the perverse tax structure that encouraged much of the most maladaptive business behavior in the first place. Plus, the Chinese demographic collapse has now begun to bite and the state-owned sector of its economy, which has been sucking up all that new wealth generated over the last four decades, is still as bankrupt and non-performing as ever. China is in for an extended run of hard times. One hopes that the major positive outcome of all this now-inevitable sturm und drang is the collapse and liquidation of the PRC as a government.

And there is still plenty of manufacturing taking place in the U.S. Even fasteners. Aerospace fastener manufacturing never decamped overseas. I live in So. CA. There are dozens of specialty fastener makers around here.

As for the Indians, it is certainly true that most of their better-off citizens speak, read and write English – or British, anyway. I would be delighted to see English become the dominant language in India as more and more of her citizenry achieve educated middle-class status, but I think Hindi is likely to persist even if a lot of other Indian regional languages fall out of use.

As for cultural “imperalism” on India’s part, that is already long underway. Indian religious ideas like karma and reincarnation have longstanding beachheads in N. America, especially among people of your general political persuasion where they are even normative among many who also fancy themselves atheists. Among American leftists, “atheism” is a code word meaning “not Judeo-Christian.”

Other aspects of culture have lagged behind, but are catching up. Bollywood is very much on the American pop-culture radar now with many of its major stars – the female ones, anyway – now well-established in American show business.

Indian literature in English isn’t yet a commonplace here. Your judgement of its quality relative to American literature may well be correct, but, if so, only owing to the degraded and tediously left-wing nature of so much of what passes for American literature these days. That and the general tendency of the American academy to be overly impressed with the more formal style in which much British-derived English literature is composed.

Yes, Russian immigrants have often done well here in the U.S., even the criminals. That’s because they’re in the U.S. now, not Russia, and had the audacity to leave Mother Russia in the first place. Unless Russia once again forbids emigration, that’s what will siphon off the small percentage of Russians who might otherwise be well-suited for homesteading. But having to stay in Russia by order of the “Czar” isn’t going to act as an incentive to homestead in harsh wilderness. That’s especially so if one knows in advance that, even if one is successful, the only likely result is having your hard-won gains summarily expropriated and handed to some favored oligarch or other.