Inside Russia's Energomash (rocket factory)


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Oh Brother - both for the lax security and the decrepitude of the facility. Follow the link to Lana's blog for the pics - it's in Russian though.

RedOrbit....

Lana Sator's blog & pics....

Russian Rocket Security Caught Sleeping On The Job

On Thursday, Russia?s deputy prime minister vowed to punish ?sleepy? security officials who were caught dozing off in photos taken by bloggers.

Blogger Lana Sator said she and her friends were not caught as they roamed around state rocket-maker Energomash?s plant on five separate occasions.

She posted almost 100 pictures of decrepit-looking hardware from inside an engine-fuel testing tower, the plant?s control room and even its roof.

Russian media quoted a senior space agency official as saying that the breach was a shock. ??It showed a complete inability to protect anything whatsoever,? the official told Izvestia.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the security failure was ?unacceptable? and warned that ?sleepy cats? who failed to maintain security at strategic defense sites will face punishment.

Russia has faced plenty of embarrassments in the past year with its space program, most recently with a Russian communications satellite that crashed last week.

An unmanned cargo spacecraft crashed in August, and a Russian Mars-bound craft got stuck in orbit in November. ?The space program also lost a $265-million communication satellite.

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That's not an abandoned building it's one of their military and civilian rocket engine factories - as the last bunch of pics show there is powered up equipment, engineers working in a control room and elsewhere and rocket engine clusters. I also doubt that DPM Rogozin would have blown a gasket over abandoned buildings. Basically, this tends to confirm what reports have been coming out, from foreigners and Russians alike, that their institutions are crumbling.

Energomash is one of the largest rocket engine designers in Russia, and they produce the RD-171/180/191 series. A partial list -

RD-0107: first stage engine for Soyuz

RD-0108: second stage core engine for Soyuz

RD-0253: first stage engine for Proton

RD-170 family: first stage engine for the Zenit and the booster engines for Energia

RD-180: first stage engine for the US Atlas V

RD-191: first stage engine for the Angara family

http://en.rian.ru/ru.../170546115.html

Minister orders Russian space agency security blitz after blogger invasion

Russia?s space agency Roscosmos has been given until January to rectify security at its plants or face the consequences, after a reported penetration of its rocket plant in northern Moscow.

A group of Russian bloggers claimed in a report posted on the Internet that they managed to get inside the Energomash plant in Moscow?s Khimki district, which manufactures liquid-propellant engines for civilian and military rockets.

They were able to wander about and take pictures for five days, and did not see any security officers.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said harsh measures would be taken to enforce security and punish the ?sleepy cats? responsible for the plant?s security.

?There will be no freewheeling,? he told Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin, and also gave a warning to the bloggers, who he called ?cheeky mice.?

?I don?t advise anybody to penetrate strategic installations anymore,? he said.

The Energomash plant can be accessed through holes in the fence, which it has no money to repair, Energia rocket and space corporation?s Senior Vice President Vladimir Osmolovsky told Izvestia newspaper.

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DOC! stop posting these! :cry: (there's no stonger crying emoticon that i can find)

horrible news...what's wrong with our Russian friends? even massive brain drain can't lead to something like this!

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This started with the post-Soviet decline of the 1990's.

This isn't that widely known outside the aerospace and political circles, but in order to prevent ex-Soviet rocket engineers and scientists from migrating to North Korea or Iran the US & Europe set up joint ventures with Roscosmos and outfits like Energomash to keep them busy. Un-busy Russian engineers and scientists were given easy immigration to Western nations.

Projects included the joint development with PW Rocketdyne of the RD-180 engine, the buying of Soyuz seats, helping pay for their ISS modules etc. All to keep the Russian space sector going.

Even with this support there wasn't enough money for upgrades, or to mitigate their demographics problem. Russia itself spent whatever extra monies they later allocated unwisely - keeping bloated Soviet era bureaucracies going, not setting up their new ventures on the Western model, or with Western input etc.

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figured it was mostly brain drain to blame, i know a lot of Russian/Ukrainian people in the states, many of them really skilled engineers. this is no coincidence. how can this be improved then?

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Russia has a long way to go before the many tens of millions of Russians that left since let's say the 50's are replaced and replenished. i don't mean to make people sound like a commodity, but it's a sad fact that most of the people that work in the Russian space industry are either the ones who can't get a job elsewhere or have yet to look for one. i know this is doing a great injustice to the few that are capable and simply want to live there, but they are few and not enough to carry to system forward.

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