Russia Takes Soviet-Style Tack To Salvage Space Program

MOSCOW — Compared to last century's Cosmonaut glory, Russia's space program is looking more like a dud these days.

On May 16, a Proton-M rocket crashed in Siberia with its commercial load, a Mexican telecommunications satellite. A week earlier, a Progress spacecraft, a Russian cargo craft that was supposed to deliver more than three tons of supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), instead disintegrated in the Pacific Ocean after falling out of orbit. And the difficulties of another Progress craft already docked to the ISS have hampered a planned correction of its orbit.

This isn't the first time that Russia's space industry has faced a succession of misfortunes, even in recent years. But this latest rough patch coincides with the May 18 approval of legislation aimed at overhauling the sector. It calls for all the industry's actors to be regrouped inside a single state corporation, the Russian Federal Space Agency, more commonly known as Roscosmos.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin reacted to the recent series of failures by urging patience. "These contingencies result from a systemic crisis in the industry, which Roscosmos has yet to overcome," he said.

But Mikhail Degtyarev, deputy chairman of the Parliamentary Commission for Science and High Technology, characterized the nature of the problem very differently. "Suddenly, two spacecrafts of different types crash," he said. "There's something fishy. National security organizations need to look abroad or inside the sector to find the causes, focusing in priority on the possibility of sabotage." The influential lawmaker believes the right recipe...