The Von Braunian

Russia now finds itself making Mephistophelian deals. It routinely sells its hard-won expertise to the highest bidder—one week putting would-be Soyuz passenger Lance Bass through medical tests at the Institute for Biomedical Problems, the next week spinning a European astronaut in the centrifuge at the Gagarin Cosmonauts Training Center in Star City. The image of the Russian brain-for-hire has become a clich. In the movie Armageddon, a cosmonaut fixes a problem on the space station by banging on an instrument console with a hammer. “That’ll be a thousand dollars,” he declares. “A thousand dollars for one bang of a hammer?” asks his American colleague, aghast. “Da. One dollar for the bang, 999 dollars for knowing where to bang.”

Russians know where to bang. But that may be small consolation to senior engineers who, once pleasantly “warmed by the state,” now find themselves earning a quarter the salary of a cab driver on the night shift in Pushkin Square. Everywhere there are reminders that the great Korolevian era is over. ICBMs that once thrummed across Red Square on parade day now launch foreign satellites at market prices. Venerable institutions like Cosmonautics magazine are being kept alive by private money. And when journalists wish to interview old-guard cosmonauts, those cosmonauts will sometimes ask to be paid—assuming that everything is negotiable in the new market economy, including their own recollections.

And so Russia has morphed from the world’s purest state-run space program to the world’s most commercial space program. But it would not be correct to say that when the Soviet Union died in 1991 the von Braunian impulse died with it. Russian space scientists have been courted by the United States, France and Canada, at wages befitting top scientists rather than fry cooks. Some did leave Energia, but the brain drain was not as comprehensive as one might expect. “There are people who will never leave the aerospace industry even though they’re offered much more elsewhere,” Poleschuk says. “I have great respect for these people.”

At Energia, engineers still have big plans. “We’re working on Mars flights, we’re talking about creating Moon bases, we’re talking about creating observation posts at the LaGrange points to detect asteroids, and to build interplanetary factories at these points,” Poleschuk says. The Institute for Biomedical Problems is planning a $2 million isolation-chamber experiment (funded by the European Space Agency): In 2006 a handful of scientists will be sent into the 450-square-foot chamber for a year and a half—a trial run to simulate how a crew would experience a mission to Mars.


A Mars mission isn’t at the top of the to-do list in a nation where many people aren’t getting properly fed, but as far as many Russians are concerned, the big von Braunian dreams are the only ones worth having. “I am a patriot of the idea of space conquest,” says Poleschuk.


What of the O’Neillian cowboys trying to open up space with private investments? Dennis Pivnyk, the prow-jawed deputy director of Khrunichev, shakes his head. “We have to lean on the state, on the government,” he says. “We cannot finance space from commercial sources. We. Can. Not.”

OK, then, what about a national program, but something less, um, conquistadorial. More contemplative. How about the Saganite idea of virtually exploring Mars? “Maybe eventually, with artificial intelligence, we’ll be able to replace human beings,” Poleschuk says. “Maybe even to go to Mars. But then, why would you? Why should we go to Mars virtually?” Because it’s safer? “The exaggerated safety demand is growing out of proportion in the press,” Poleschuk says, reddening. “The states are listening way too much to people lying on the sofa. These people are dummies, in the dark. This is typical of all jaded civilizations.”