Academician Marov urged to repeat the launch of “Luna-25”

Let me remind you that Mikhail Marov is the oldest representative of our space science, the head of the Laboratory of Planetary Research and Cosmochemistry of GEOKHI named after. Vernadsky RAS, which participated and was the organizer of many successful Soviet interplanetary missions. He was very much looking forward to a new soft landing on the moon of the domestic device after almost half a century of break, and when he heard about his fall, he went to the hospital … Now he is at the Central Clinical Hospital, we are talking to him on the phone.

“When a spacecraft is created, nothing is done in the singular,” Mikhail Yakovlevich argues his proposal to create an analogue or even a copy of Luna-25. “So it would be a very economical option. In six months it would be possible to assemble it, in another six months – to test it and in a year again send it to the moon.

– That is, already in 2024 or 2025?

– Yes. And I think it’s quite real. The savings would be 30-40%, and besides, we would go through all the controversial systems again, we would do real work on the bugs and still land the device on the moon.

Marov can be understood. It is very difficult for people like him, who have devoted their whole lives to the development of domestic cosmonautics, to come to terms with the fact that we have long forgotten how to fly to the moon.

True, I’ll get better: the young shift nevertheless managed to “fly” to the Moon, the Luna-25 apparatus even flew around it as an artificial satellite for two days, collecting data on the radiation situation, fixing the main components of the lunar soil with the help of their instruments. Yes, he did not sit down, and our veterans, such as Marov, are surprised by this.

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Here is a conversation that I had the other day with one of the experienced employees of space science, whose name I am not naming at his request.

“A lot of things were destroyed in our country in the post-perestroika years,” my interlocutor says, “and we still cannot overcome this! The saddest thing is that we are repeating mistakes like the one that led to the fall of Phobos-Grunt into the ocean.

– What prevents you from working together today?

– Firstly, there are very few sensible personnel. Surprisingly, our schoolchildren and students win international computer science olympiads, but we fail to create a normal apparatus control system. How can this be understood? And I’ll tell you: the reason is small, unattractive salaries in our institutes and at the enterprises of Roskosmos. Most of the talented guys seem to pass them by. Meanwhile, the staff of executives (some of them are very far from our science) are disproportionately inflated, and their salaries are many times higher than those who are directly involved in the creation of complex space technology.

Secondly, bureaucracy, the so-called tenders, have not yet been eliminated at our enterprises … I can imagine how surprised the same Georgy Nikolayevich Babakin (ex-head of the Lavochkin NPO) would be surprised. — Auth.), if he were offered to choose from two radio systems the one that is worse, but cheaper. Naturally, he would choose the best one, regardless of the price, because we used to work for the result. The current directors for this will immediately be invited to the prosecutor for “overspending public money.” That is, now the whole system is arranged in such a way that a positive result, the success of a new mission, is rather an accident, because a lot, in fact, is aimed at putting spokes in its wheels. I’m not talking about a specific Luna-25 now, for a long time this was a common problem for everyone.

– And what, in your opinion, could happen to Luna-25?

– It’s hard for me to say, I no longer work in the industry, but, judging by the description of the emergency situation by Roscosmos, the onboard control system failed. You understand?! And this is 10 years after the failure with Phobos-Grunt, whose control system also failed! All this causes unpleasant feelings.

– How, I wonder, did you manage in the 60s and 70s, when there were no on-board computers at all?

“To be honest, today I myself am surprised how we managed to do it. But complex devices have been landed on both the Moon and Mars. They were controlled by the so-called autonomous program-time device. This was the series switching of mechanical relays. At the right moment, somewhere in the orbit of Mars, voltage was applied to the device, and the necessary contacts closed. And surprisingly, all this worked reliably and consistently and led to soft landings.

– Then they also created such devices much faster.

“That’s right,” they could assemble and successfully send a space station to the Moon or Mars in six months. And now, with such technology, such modern programs, we have been doing them for 20 years – and the result is almost zero.

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But let’s get back to Mikhail Marov’s proposal to create a new Luna-25 in the shortest possible time, because it would just help us avoid long intervals between programs. I conveyed this idea to Anatoly Petrukovich, director of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and this is what he replied:

– The proposal, of course, is interesting, but, to be honest, this is a very optimistic view of things. It would be nice to create a second “Luna-25”, but I’m afraid that this is impossible. We would very much like to move forward, without delay, in accordance with our lunar program. The next stage, which Yury Borisov spoke about at the Roscosmos cosmodrome, is Luna-26, which is scheduled to launch in 2027.

– But why such a big gap – 4 years?

— Such is the logic of creating projects. It is impossible to assemble complex devices on the knee: something needs to be ordered, worked out, tested, something needs to be developed anew due to the need for import substitution.

Currently, everyone is waiting for the adoption of the continuation of the lunar space program from 2026 to 2035. Experts are sure that if funding for lunar projects is allocated on time, all necessary contracts are concluded on time, and the parties fulfill their obligations on time, then there should be no delays in the future. As for the new Luna-25, one of my interlocutors did not rule out that, perhaps, according to the results of the state commission, which has now begun to analyze the reasons that led to the accident of the interplanetary station, experts will make a radical decision: “Nothing can be ruled out here, everything will depend on the decision of the commission.”

PS There are other points of view on the problem of the crash of Luna-25, to which we will return in the near future.