Just to start a general topic, we've discussed some aspects of the old Soviet planetary exploration programs, but we've never had a topic devoted to the discussion, where we can discuss it in general terms.

So, the question is, did the Russians have significantly more problems with their early lunar and planetary probes than the U.S. did? How about ESA or JAXA? How do they all compare?

And what would y'all say is the reason for differences in success/failure rates, and quality of data returned, by probes built and flown by the various polities which have attempted them thus far?

I can think, specifically, of Russian lunar orbiters that returned image data of far poorer quality and usefulness than contemporary American orbiters... of the '71 Mars debacle, in which a functioning Soviet orbiter couldn't be re-targeted real-time and spent all of its pre-planned science program photographing the blank, featureless top of a global dust storm... of more than their fair share of probes ending up as junk decorating the steppes of Kazakhstan.

But, then again, you can always bring up the failures of Rangers 1-6, two of the seven Surveyors, the partial failure of Lunar Orbiter 1, etc., etc., etc., while the Russians were merrily taking pictures (albeit low-quality ones) of the far side of the Moon and landing small pods on its surface.

What do y'all think the balances were? What learning-curve lessons-learned are we seeing repeat themselves in the ESA and JAXA programs?

Just trying to get a sense of the group on this one.

-the other Doug

I would say that the Soviet state did have more failures, theres no doubt in my mind about that.

It is not certain if we know how many attempts that did blow up on the pad or in the very first minutes of their flight.
One reason for that are that there were not one single 'design bureau' in Russia for spacecraft and launching rockets, but several that competed against each other.

So yes I do think there has been more launch attempts than any contemporary source list.
There might have been more for the single reason that they wasn't announced prior to launch or named before they already were up in space. The wellknown secrecy.
We knew so little about the Soviet space launchers that the popular press for a while got away with the wild speculation that they had nuclear powered rockets. (No I did not buy that idea personally, though I did some speculation of my own that they used some odd fuels - I expected the Soviet program to have quite more heritage from the Nazi-German WW2 rockets than they turned out to have. And some of those used very toxic fuels.)

Yes the USA did blow up some launchers also, these became spectacular failures with so much exposure since it was all in the open.

Then again, when the Soviet probe had reached orbit but failed to get into the trajectory for the Moon, Mars or Venus. They still did the announcement, since the launch had been tracked and monitored in any case by the missle early warning system and other means such as monotring of signals etc.


But if the launch was a partial failure they would give the probe in question the name 'Zond' for example instead of Luna or 'Mars' if it was enroute to the intended destinaiton. The list of probes named 'Cosmos' and 'Zond' are in fact very long.

If we take the information from Russian Space Web at face value there were no less that 60 launches towards the Moon. Definitely more that the USA and far more failures. But their persistence did pay off eventually, no doubt about that.
Whats interesting are that the list contain 11 completely unnamed ones there, the list for Mars got 6 unnamed ones and the list for Venus have got 4.

The same site
Russian Space Web do list 20 attempts for Mars, of those we can only say that 5 or 6 of those were at least a partial success.
Lastly we see 29 listed for Venus and its only here we see a number of attempts that are comparable to the number of sucesses of the US space program.

-"-

And as a side note about secrecy: It might be hard to understand for those today who can just write a search word or two and then get to see one image of a Soviet space probe or Manned vehicle like Voshod.
But back then we didnt know what they looked like at all.
It took until shortly before the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975 that we finally got a preview of what one Soyuz looked like.
I remember my initial reaction 'How small it is!' the notion of Soviet spacecraft being big must have lingered in my subconsious until that point.

I don't want to digress into politics really but isn't it strange that flag bearer for the centrally planned, command style economic and political model opted for a competition based approach while the leading proponent for the free market capitalist model opted for a centrally managed solution?

The overall topic is very interesting but it would be very useful if we had a proper way to compare the two approaches. The number of failures doesn't tell you as much as the total cost of each approach and neither tells you very much about the relative capabilities or the merit of the current capability that has evolved from each approach. However from an engineering standpoint failures are good things in the long term provided they don't cost too much as they are much more definitive proofs than successes are. Oh and also provided that your system allows you to learn from the failures of course. We learn that certain approaches are not good enough through failures but, as the Shuttle has shown, apparent success for a period of time can happen through good luck and can hide some very serious problems.

The Soviet approach to "all" aerospace projects was to build prototypes, test them, then build on that testing until the designs approached the original goals. The failures in space were exactly because of that incremental, multi-flight approach. The waters were muddied by the need for propaganda victories, but the basic ethos remained the same: multiple prototypes and gradual perfection. It worked!

It didn't always work - the N-1 never flew often enough to get the bugs out (though Energia worked from the start). But the early Luna landers demonstrate the approach, as do the Venus and Mars probes. We still see the effects of the policy in the Soyuz launcher, the family of Soyuz spacecraft, the space-tug/space-station modules, the unmanned Vostok-derived spacecraft, Breeze-M...

The US built their few hand-tooled Cadillacs - the Soviets built production lines!

(and, in passing, the Soyuz configuration was revealed at the time of the first dockings)

Bob Shaw

And another example is Mir-Skylab-ISS. Whereas Mir was an evolution of the original prototype and was a functioning space station for many years (although antiquated and somewhat quaint) it did work for a very long time. Skylab was a prototype that worked ever with an adverse start, then it was abandoned. It had as much or more potential for development as MIP did. ISS works, but it is the Cadillac (or Rolls) approach.

--Bill

Bill:

Yes. When I first heard that the ISS employed such technologies as chemical milling to reduce weight, I wanted to scream. Big, clunky battleships like Skylab and Mir, that was the way to go. Not only did they design what was in effect a metal balloon when they built the ISS, but the US space agency then abandoned the TransHab technology which would have made sensible inflated modules.

Hopefully, the Russians still have some ex-Soviet space station kit in their back pockets, ready to be sold on to NASA!

Bob Shaw

If it meets the strength requirements, why do you want to make your structure heavier? Chem-milling got us to the Moon, after all; it was extensively used on the LM and is a well-established technology.

I don't think this is why the ISS cost so much.

I agree. Chemical milling is a standard technique in the aerospace world. Sure, it's fairly expensive, but launching unneeded metal is even more expensive.

tty

Well, let's just say that I somehow doubt if chemical milling was on the agenda for the numerous Soviet space stations or their ISS modules; clever it may be, but I'm for battleships - the sort of docking modules that can cope with the stresses imposed by the impact of a runaway Progress freighter and not crumple! I'm sure chemical milling did reduce the ISS structural weight by many thousands of pounds, but was the financial burden of going for sophistication rather than brute strength really worth it?

For many years I used a Pentax SLR camera, but when going walkabout taking pictures I always carried a Soviet Zenit E-M camera. It was heavy, had a brass body, cost 10% of the price of the Pentax, had great optics, and I knew that if push came to shove and anyone tried to take it off me I could either let them have it at little financial cost to me or just 'let them have it' at some substantial cost to the shape of their head. Now, my lovely little Pentax would just have shattered...

...I suspect there may have been some chemically milled components in the Pentax; as for the Zenit...

Bob Shaw

How about if the module just pops a seal and has to be abandoned in place? That's pretty much what happened with the Spektr module on Mir, "battleship" or no.

I'd rather fly a kg of payload than a kg of insufficiently lightweighted structure. And I really don't think that chem milling adds that much expense. It's extensively used in commercial aircraft.

I think Bob was alluding to the crash of a soyuz spacecraft with Spektr. That's what caused its failure, not just a seal failure. It's hull was punctured.

Obviously. But my point was that the heavier structure of the Russian module didn't maintain its structural integrity in this case, did it?

Mike:

No, but the main Mir docking assembly *did* survive some enormous instantaneous stresses during the Progress/Spektr collision. Would a minimum-weight version have worked so well? My point is simply that far from being quaint or backward, Soviet - and Russian - engineering is, and was, first class, cheap, and, er, heavy! I'd rather have an ISS (or any other spacecraft) which weighed twice as much, if it cost half as much to build...

Bob Shaw

Doug, you ask a number of interesting questions.

In the early days, say from 1957 - 1964, the Soviet and American probes had a similar failure rate. America launched over a dozen lunar probes in the Pioneer/Able and Ranger series, which failed. And the Russians lost several attempts to repeat the Luna-3 mission or probes to Mars and Venus. I think this must be chalked up to the steep learning curve, when completely new technology is being developed and a new environment is being explored. Also, by the early 1960s, Russia was attempting more difficult tasks than NASA -- Mars and Venus photo flybys and landers, and Lunar soft landings years before Surveyor.

I think the American program took a little while to catch up, but when it did, it benefited from better funding and a superior industrial economy-- commercially successful industries with higher quality and more rapid innovation. Both sides had good scientists and engineers and good school systems. It is my belief that the commercial sector was where the big difference was made.

The Russians had, more powerful rockets which permitted them to launch very heavy and complex probes. Their people did some pretty clever things inspite of the adversities of their situation. They also had powerful escape-stage technology (Block-L and Block-D), while America's development of the Centaur was troubled and delayed. With a limited budget (about 10 percent of NASA's), the Russians focused attention on Venus, and did good work there.

The difficulty with Mars-3 was its radio system. When over-used, it would temporarily shut down, and the Russians decided to treat it with great care. Mars-3 relayed all of its various science data successfully, but its images were only sent back at low resolution, for fear of overtaxing the transmitter sending a long high-resolution scan. It is not true that it shot all its film during the dust storm. It was programmed to take 12 photos, upon command from Earth. This was done six times from November though March (the dust storm was over by December). If its radio had functioned, it could have returned some useful images, but it did not have enough film to compete with Mariner-9, which mapped most of the planet's surface.

Given the Japanese' extraordinary technical expertise, I am a little disapointed by JAXA and their problems with the Mars and asteroid missions. My feeling is, they just have a small population of scientists and engineers for such all-encompassing work, and they do not cooperate as much with other experts.

ESA has benefited from close work with NASA and Russia, and a willingness to use existing technology -- American or Russian orbital deep-space launch capability, the Boeing 601 spacecraft, fairly standardized deep-space telemetry systems, etc. Their scientists could focus on building cameras and scientific instruments, instead of engaging in the steep and expensive learning curve you speak of.

The book "Difficult Road to Mars", written by a Soviet engineer, reveals much about how the Soviet Mars program was run. It was the Politburo, not scientists or even engineers, who called the shots and they wanted launches to Mars at every opposition (I think they skipped only 1966). Their message was "you WILL launch regardless of how ready you are". Apparently they were hoping for any kind of partial success for propaganda value. In the rush to meet deadlines, corners were cut and testing was less than minimal.

What strikes me is how many Soviet lunar and Mars missions seem to have failed by more-or-less bad luck and how many American missions had serious problems that could have easily led to failure but succeeded by more-or-less good luck. Think how close Viking 1 landed to Big Joe boulder, Apollo 14's near failure docking the lunar and command modules in Earth orbit, Apollo 16's flaking paint. even MER's EDL environment being almost too much for the landing system to survive. Are American systems that much more robust than Russian systems, is it just luck, or did God just really, really hate Communism?

I've read Perminov's book too, it's a good source of information. He doesn't say the Politburo chose missions, but there was a lot of budget limitation and a lot of power struggles between many individual power figures. Perminov doesn't address that in detail, but you had people like Afansyev, Korolev, Glushko, Mishin, Chelomei, general Ustinov and others, all exercising power.

They did have bad luck with missions that might otherwise have been fine (Mars-1, Zond-2, etc). And it was a miracle that Mariner-2 made it to Venus in one piece. It just barely did, with a failed solar panel, failing optical navigation sensors, and electronics heated to over 100 C!

But overall, the quality and sophistication of American space systems was vastly greater. I've seen films of people working on Venera-4 -- the spacecraft opened up and you can see it was competely packed with vacuum tubes. I kid you not.

What fascinates me about the Soviet space program was their can-do attitude, given all the deficiencies of the system. Political chaos, inferior components, alcoholic managers like Mishin. They just trudged on and did some impressive things now and then. I'd argue that Venera-9 and Venera-15 were both incredibly ground-breaking achievements of great complexity. But look close, and you will see tubes, gears, stuff that looks like tractor parts welded together. It's really fascinating.

The Soviets/Russians have had a near-100% failure rate with their Mars missions. By this site's count they have sent 20 probes to Mars. At best they have had partial successes with only one or two. The rest have been dismal failures, with a very high proportion not even reaching Mars.

By contrast, the US has fared far better:

Flybys -- 1 failure, 3 successes
Orbiters-- 3 failures, 6 successes (counting the Viking orbiters)
Landers -- 1 failure, 5 successes (counting the Viking landers)
=========================================
Total --- 5 failures, 14 successes (counting the Viking orbiters & landers separately).

If there is a Great Ghoul it obviously prefers the taste of Russian probes to American ones.

More soberly, it is the Soviet/Russian failure rate which drags down the statistics which (in turn) keeps the pundits claiming how hard it is to get to Mars. The truth is America has found it not that hard getting to Mars (and succeeding there) at all. Their own statistics speak for themselves. Even going back to the '60s, for every one of its Mars probes which has failed the US has had 2 successful ones.

IMHO you can no more "blame" that on good luck than you can blame the repeated Soviet/Russian failures on bad luck or Martian Ghouls.

======
Stephen

It's still a complex question. The Russians tried and failed to reach Mars five times in 1960 and 1962, at a time when America was not ready to even try it. You cannot really compare those failures to American successes made in the 21-century. But I do believe that the Russians had quality control problems and were disadvantaged by their socialist economic system, which was not innovative or motivated to produce quality.

On the other hand, after Lavochkin began manufacturing spacecrafts, they had a fine success rate with their Venus probes. I don't believe it was technically much more difficult for them to send probes to Mars than to Venus, so there does seem to be an element of good luck and bad luck. Landing on Mars is harder, certainly, but not orbiting.

After 1973, they decided to concentrate their smaller program on doing something where they were breaking new ground and not just repeating American missions. That was Venus. I think that explains why they are interested in the Fobos-Grunt mission, which really would be an exciting new accomplishment.

We also have to remember that the US program took considerable time to "get rolling", in part due to major bad luck on the same order as the bad luck the Russians had with Mars.

We had 15 consecutive lunar and lunar-related mission failures before Ranger 7 was a mission success in 1964. At first it was an unending string of launch failures: 0% launch success in the Pioneer probe series, the closest to a success was Pioneer 4 which did a distant lunar flyby into solar orbit, but too far out to test the camera-trigger payload (no real camera, just a photosensor) or the geiger counters to see anything related to the moon. The Block-1 Rangers, #s 1 and 2, were to be highly eccentric orbit tests of 3-axis controlled spacecraft for the Lunar missions to follow... 2 Agenas failed to boost them out of low orbit and they re-entered in short order. The Block 2 Rangers: 3 was mislaunched and couldnt' reach the moon and failed inflight anyway, 4 and 5 failed in flight or at liftoff, Block 3 Ranger 6 was trashed by corona discharge during launch as the TV camera high voltage was inadvertently turned on.

The Russians had a horrendous launch failure rate, too, but they "snuck in" some good launches early on in the Luna and planetary programs. Unfortunately, the complexity of planetary missions was beyond their quality control abilities and none of the early missions succeeded other than the engineering test flight of Zond 3 past the moon. The US was almost impossibly lucky with Mariner 2, but Mariner 4 built on that mission's technology and emerged with a remarkably mature spacecraft that had few significant inflight problems and survived both primary and extended missions till depletion of the attitude control gas in 1967. The Mariner spacecraft architecture, with constant modifications, lasted till the Galileo mission, the last interplanetary mission to build-up the spacecraft around a polygonal spacecraft "bus". Viking Orbiters, Voyagers, Magellan and Galileo were all ultimately "Mariners" when you strip appendages off them and whittle them down to the core.

Don commented: "...Given the Japanese' extraordinary technical expertise, I am a little disapointed by JAXA and their problems with the Mars and asteroid missions..."

I was very disappointed by the Mars orbiter failure. It was partially bad luck, but also that they simply didn't have quite sufficiently rad-hard electronics in a critical part of the spacecraft. It's one thing to have to deal with a spacecraft safing caused by a radiation storm, and to have a spacecraft essentially entirely disabled by a permanent power system component failure.

The Japanese have done planetary research with a VW-micro-bus class budget and have pulled off some miracles with Hayabusa. They have also chosen "gap-filler" missions that the "big boys" of the US, Soviets/Russia/ESA have ignored. The field-and-particles and atmospheric-meteorology-aeronomy science that they were going to do at Mars and now at Venus were intended and are going to fill major gaps in other mission's science investigations.

The Americans have bigger wallets, and the ability to look at the Soviet missions for lessons-learned, even though there was limited cooperation. The Viking I & II probes had fuel reserves of more than 30%, and in general the engineering margins were wider than Soviet designs.

When the US tried to use a faster/better/cheaper approach, the engineer margins were tighter, and there were failures. Likewise, according to Bruce, MER I was within seconds of a total failure, and Mer II would have been in the same boat if the Parachute deployment criteria had not been altered, based upon the Spirit data. You should also include the failures of both of the impact probes. Mars is not easy.

It is also somewhat of a myth that Soviet designs are clunky and and heavy - form follows function. I have been told by material scientists who studied the Soviet missile program after peace broke out, that Soviet metal alloy technology was 'light years' ahead of US metallurgy.

The Russians are a remarkably inventive people I believe, and had good well-trained engineers and scientists. In terms of the big picture of space exploration, they were not at all second rate. They were unfortunately limited by a very corrupt politcial system and an unsuccessful socialist economy.

Look at massive organizations, like the Ministry of General Machine Building. My impression is that Afanasyev was a remarkably talented manager, and certainly he had a huge responsibility. In charge of all rocket and missle production, Brezhnev once told him that his job was crucial and if he failed he would be shot. Afanasyev used to repleat that story, with pride. When these folks wanted to do something, they did it, and sometimes with unbelievable speed. Economical, simple, and modular design in their rockets was a success of this system. But inattention to a lot of emerging technology was a failing. The Russians were masters of optics and mechanical engineering and metalurgy, but failed to give other areas like microelectroncis the necessary priority. If it wasn't planned by management, it didn't happen.

Talking about materials research, I would remark especially on the staged-combustion rocket engine, one of Russia's most impressive inventions. The metals, seals and lubricants developed for this design had to withstand incredibly harsh operating conditions. I'm also sure nobody else knows as much about titanium alloys, since they have a special fondness for that difficult and interesting metal.

.

Very interesting discussion so far - thank you. I wonder if what I was led to believe growing up about the Soviet early ICBM technologies was correct - that they needed heavier lift since the warheads weren't as miniaturized and thus were more easily repurposed as orbital launch vehicles. Or was that Atomic Cafe style U.S. propaganda to assuage our wounded pride over Sputnik?

Mars Observer wasn't part of FBC; Goldin wasn't even working for NASA when it was being developed, and he had been the administrator for less than 6 months when it was launched.

And to say that the '98 missions failed because of an inherently-flawed program is a gross oversimplication at best. Look at the razor-thin margins that separated the MERs from failure.

What was the problem on the MER missions?

Here is a recent thread with some details --

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2909

Luck plays a big role in all missions, but you have to make your luck.. and buy it.

Mars Observer failed primarily because of "ideological" mission design requirements forced on the project by NASA HQ, followed by sloppy management and inadequate attention to detail where needed. The main assumption was that you could take a nearly off-the-shelf spacecraft (geosynch comsat bus, I think) and modify it for a planetary mission and stick instruments on it. It wasn't anyway near that simple.

The 98 missions failed ultimately because they were pennypinched to death. There weren't enough money, people, time, and management to cross all the "i"s and dot all the "t"s <wink> and doublecheck everything backwards and forwards. Same as with the Genesis crash. All these missions were basically sound, we think, but bad management structures and not enough money made the difference.

The MER rovers came close to disaster, but beyond luck... there was enough capability and enough money spent on the human resources to have that capability, to catch the potential disasters and fix them just in the nick of time.

Space probes have failed in the past and will doubtless do so again in the future. America has had to endure losses to its own Mars program, but unlike those on the Soviet/Russian program they have all been isolated cases. Doubtless each can all be sheeted home to particular causes, some preventable, others less so.

Long strings of repeated failures, on the other hand--like America's Rangers 1 through 6, and the Soviet/Russian Mars probes--are an entirely different matter. They surely point to more of a systemic problem (or problems) behind the failures. Simply figuring out what went wrong on a failed probe and correcting it is on the next attempt may fix an isolated failure but it is less likely to deliver a success if the real problem is not with the probes themselves. For even if the engineers prevent the last problem happening again there will probably be another problem waiting in the wings to bring you (and your probe) back down to the proverbial earth.

In that context to have such a long string of failures (and over such an extended period) as the Soviet Mars program had surely does point to an inherently flawed program. That does not mean Soviet engineers were any the less brilliant or inventive. It simply means that something in or about the program itself, or the way it was run, was defeating their efforts.

I do not pretend to know what that factor was or the systemic flaw or flaws were. I can only point to the statistics. That said consider the orbiter part of Mars 2, which arrived at the Red Planet in 1971. Technically Mars 2's orbiter was not a failure. AFAIK the hardware performed flawlessly. It arrived safely and did what it had been built to do. Yet that orbiter returned no useful imaging data because it happened to arrive during one of the largest global dust storms in modern martian history. Now you could put that down to sheer bad luck. Yet America's Mariner 9 was potentially in the same boat. When it arrived it too was faced with that same global dust storm obscuring the entire planet.

The difference was that whereas the Americans could re-program their probe and get it to sit the dust storm out the Soviets could not. They had foolishly given it a pre-programmed course of action which could not be changed.

To put it another way, by sending off Mars 2 on a pre-programmed mission the Soviets actually were relying on luck. And blind luck at that. They were relying on there being no problems at the Mars end of the mission.

Unfortunately, Mother Nature failed to cooperate. It threw both the Soviets and the Americans a nasty curve ball in the form of that dust storm. But whereas the Americans had enough foresight to send a probe which could handle the unexpected the Soviets chose to send one which could not.

That raises the question of what proportion of the other Soviet failures were due to the probes being unable to cope with the unanticipated?

======
Stephen

Rangers 1 and 2 were launch failures. 3 was mis-launched but failed in flight, anyway. 6 was "sort of" a launch failure, as rocket exhaust shorted pins in an umbilical plug and commanded the TV camera on and then off when corona discharge would occur in the middle atmosphere <sput-sizzle>.

The failure string of Ranger's 3 through 5 was probably due to a mix of inadequate quality control, loss of redundancy and "engineering rigor" during massive spacecraft weight reduction campaigns as the Atlas/Agena's predicted throw weight kept decreasing below designed spacecraft mass, and the hardware damage of ill-advised sterilization to keep from biologically contaminating the moon.

Mars 2 send back little data because its transmitter didn't work well and its signal was garbled. The legend that Mars 3 simply photographed the dust storm because it was entirely pre-programmed is simply not true. However, as eluded to in another thread, it also had a faltering transmitter, which could only be used for short periods of time, so images were transmitted at very low resolution, making them not that useful. Other scientific data, which was much less voluminous than image data, was transmitted in full.

Sure, but luck doesn't usually come with a clearly-marked price.


This is the conventional view (and, as a Mars'98 veteran, one I'm getting tired of hearing, can you tell?) But how much more money would it have taken? Ultimately, both Mars'98 failures and the Genesis failure could have been fixed with 5 extra minutes of engineering time apiece, costing a few dollars. If you think that you eliminate mistakes, even stupid ones, with buckets of extra money, you're dreaming. Look at how close some of the MER problems came to failure, and they spent 4x what Mars'98 cost. Look at the HST and Galileo problems. I suspect that a large fraction of the money spent on mission assurance is "wasted" in that it solves no problem that could have caused a failure. Taking a completely scattershot approach to mission assurance has lead to escalating mission costs. There simply has to be a balance. I can think of a lot of mission assurance effort on Mars'98 that could have been left out, and which only diverted attention from the real problems.

This is incorrect. Mars-3 took pictures on command and took many photos after the dust storm was over. The problems with Mars-2 and Mars-3 were related to their radio systems.

Mars-3 had a couple programming modes for photography. It would always take a sequence of 12 photos at once, and the film magazines held 480 frames. It could be commanded to orient itself using an infrared horizon and then take the photos, or it could be sent a detailed 3-axis orientation. Most of the photos I've seen were taken in the latter mode, while the probe was fairly far out in its elliptical orbit and showing the whole planet.