Russia’s Proton rocket falls on hard times

After 53 years in service, the main Russian launcher is running out of customers.

The Proton rocket, Russia’s primary commercial launch vehicle, faces a life-and-death struggle to remain a competitive player on the international launch market, industry sources say. The veteran Soviet space rocket has spent nearly a quarter of a century as the vehicle of choice for operators of communications satellites all over the world. But it has fallen to near-irrelevance in just a matter of two years. After reaching a peak of 12 launches in 2010, the Proton is now staring at a real possibility of flying just a couple of missions this year and not delivering a single commercial payload.

What could cause Proton’s dramatic fall from grace? It looks like a convergence of multiple factors has created a perfect storm for the Russian workhorse rocket.

The 700-ton Proton traces its roots to the Moon Race between the United States and the USSR, and the design became the locomotive of the Soviet space program. Then came the 1990s, when the the Russian rocket industry faced the chaos of the post-Soviet economic transition, combined with falling oil prices and the shrinking military budget. These factors left the rocket at the brink of collapse. However, the leadership at GKNPTs Khrunichev in Moscow (where Proton is manufactured) worked tirelessly with the newly created Russian space agency to establish a leading position for Russian rockets in the hyper-competitive western launch market. Along with numerous other joint space projects with the West, the Proton became a major moneymaker for the Russian space industry by the end of the 1990s.

The first decade of the 21st century saw skyrocketing oil prices, which gave the Kremlin plenty of cash to invest in the military and space industry. Ironically, it was during this time that the first seeds of trouble for the Russian space program were sown. Resting on the laurels of the Soviet legacy and hard-won achievements of their cash-strapped predecessors, a string of ineffective space bosses spent time lining their pockets and giving their friends and relatives lucrative, high-paid positions throughout the industry.

Meanwhile, professional competence and quality control eroded behind a glitzy façade of Roskosmos. In the case of Proton, the lack of technical oversight began manifesting itself in an increasing rate of failures, some of which looked remarkably embarrassing. At the end of 2010, one Proton plunged into the ocean because too much propellant had been mistakenly loaded into its upper stage. In 2013, another vehicle performed a fiery salto mortale seconds after liftoff because flight control sensors were hammered into the rocket’s compartment upside down.

Rogozin factor
As the technical problems with Proton and other Russian launchers were piling up, the Kremlin was adopting more aggressive anti-western policies on the international stage.

Enter Dmitry “Twitter” Rogozin. The Deputy Prime Minister was appointed in 2011 to oversee the Russian defense and space industry, and he distinguished himself with bombastic nationalist and racist messages on social media long before the rise of Trumpism. During a period of US-Russian tensions, Rogozin famously advised NASA to use a trampoline to send its astronauts to the International Space Station. This messaging came as the US agency had been paying millions to Moscow to access the orbital outpost—stemming from a deal hard won by Rogozin’s predecessors back in the 1990s.

In the end, Rogozin’s anti-western escapades symbolized the political risk associated with launching commercial payloads from Russia.

The perfect storm
In 2017, Proton spent first half of the year grounded by massive quality control problems with its engines.

The rocket returned to flight successfully in June and completed four seemingly flawless missions since then, but insurance rates for the Proton flights skyrocketed. That are up the rocket’s price advantage over its main competitors in the launch business: Arianespace and the rapidly expanding SpaceX. The cost of transporting satellites to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where Proton is based, also reportedly doubled in the past two years.

The Proton’s developer has also been slow to provide a wider 5-meter payload shroud, which has become a requirement for the hardware of many of the Proton’s customers. Developer GKNPTs Khrunichev is currently working on several new flavors of Proton rockets, including some with wider fairings, but the originally promised wide configuration was changed several times and has yet to be introduced.

All these technical, political, and financial problems combined to leave GKNPTs Khrunichev deeply in debt and triggered the exodus of customers last year—as many as five deals were reportedly lost in the second half of 2017.

Anti-record of 2018
Out of several Proton mission planned for 2018, only one is currently dedicated to the launch of a foreign commercial payloads. In a January 17 interview with the Izvestiya daily, Director General at GKNPTs Khrunichev Aleksei Varochko said that a pair of communications satellites—Eutelsat-5 West B and MEV—would be launched on a single Proton in the summer. However, sources familiar with the matter said that the assembly of the satellites at the US company Orbital ATK would not be completed until at least the fourth quarter of 2018 (or, more likely, the first quarter of 2019). European satellite operator Eutelsat pre-paid for two other Proton missions, but it has yet to decide what and when to launch.

With its international customers vanishing, the Russian government has tried to give the beleaguered vehicle some federal payloads, but these are also hard to come by.

Currently, the Blagovest-12L communications satellite developed for the Russian Ministry of Defense is scheduled for launch on Proton on March 22, making it the only sure bet for a Proton flight this year. Another classified military payload might also fly this year, apparently on as-needed basis.

Roskosmos also assigned Proton to carry the Elektro-L No. 3 weather satellite and the Spektr-RG X-ray observatory, but both of these were designed for the smaller Zenit rocket. Launching them on Proton essentially wastes the rocket’s lifting capacity, as well as time and money needed for the reconfiguration of both spacecraft. As a result, Spektr-RG no longer has a real chance to fly this year; Elektro-L is currently scheduled for launch in October, but that might also slip into 2019.

The only other Russian payload on the 2018 manifest that would truly need Proton is the 20-ton MLM Nauka module, with its launch to the International Space Station officially slated for December. “Officially” is the key word, because experts involved into the project say that the launch date had been chosen for political purposes to keep the mission in 2018 and that this deadline will be very difficult to meet.

All this means that after 53 years in service, the venerable Proton rocket might set an anti-record in 2018 by flying only a couple of missions. And, for the first time since its entrance onto the world market at the end of the Cold War, it may not bring any money to its cash-strapped developer.