Originally Posted by
Skroe
Yeah let's talk about whats going on here.
The first thing you need understand is that the production time for space hardware is extremely long. Basically 5 years for most things. Not uncommonly, closer to 10. Over the next few years there are rockets and payloads that will be launched that were constructed back in 2013 and 2014. Some of the components for the most important space hardware could have been manufactured many years ago (such as James Webb Space Telescope pieces being manufactured back in 2009).
The second thing you need to understand is that Russia has experienced truly epic industrial decline, particularly when it comes to space hardware, over the last 15 years as what was left of its Soviet-era workforce finally retired. When the Soviet Union fell, the United States moved heaven and Earth to make sure that while the rest of the fomrer USSR entered an economic depression, that those rocket and space factories would stay open and it's workers - from engineers to weilders - would remain gainfully employed. The US did this because it was concerned that, should those workers find unemployment was in their future, they'd be poached by China, Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Syria, Cuba, Libya and Pakistan. Some Soviet scientists and engineers did find there way to those places. But the US effort was largey successful. The ISS - formerly Space Station Freedom - was largely a part of that effort, as it mereged the SSF concept with some aspects of Mir-2. In no small part to keep the Russian Space agency in business.
But time happened, and now those engineers and production people who were in their 30s and 40s in the 1980s are in their 60s and 70s today.
Most of them have retired by now. And a lot of institutional knowledge was lost.
In any big project, there is the written spec, set by the design team. But the production team on the floor knows things that exist outside the spec... perhaps even tricks to complete tasks to produce faster and/or safer. These things are rarely written down. They are passed from experienced worker to novice.
The financial problems of the Russian Space Agency, coupled with the retirements has wiped out decades of institutional knowledge that will be impossible to recover. As a result Russia is seeing repeated rocket failures, production delays and major fabrication errors.... all for rockets that have only been iterated on for decades and aren't at all clean sheet, new designs.
Furthermore SpaceX has largely wiped out the Russian commercial launch service option, draining the Russian Space Program of direly needed funds.
So what is going on here? The decline of Russia is being felt first at the most high tech aspect of its industrial portfolio. It will get worse and spread, particularly if Russia seeks to become involved in future multinational projects.
Russia is saying it was made deliberately to cover for its own failure of course. But the fact is, it inherited a world class space program and that inheritance has largely been pissed away.
It's likely that post-ISS, Russia will do little more in space than fly a Soyuz once a year to show the flag, perhaps to a Chinese Space Station. As it stands right now, it cannot afford to be part of the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway program.