THE LAST COUNTDOWN?

By Jeffrey Kluger

For the Russian space program, the comeback was supposed to begin this month. Ever since the fall of communism, the agency that gave the world Sputnik, Gagarin and the space station Mir appeared to have fallen too, with slashed budgets leading to fewer launches and worried whispers in the international community that even those missions were dangerously underfinanced. Lately, however, Russia has been funneling all its space resources into the launch of its Mars '96 probe, an unmanned spacecraft designed to orbit the Red Planet, dispatch a quartet of landers to the surface and, perhaps most important, return the country to the spacefaring pre-eminence it once enjoyed.

But a little more than a week ago, the grand promenade to Mars turned into a near Earth lob shot, when a booster malfunction sent the spacecraft plummeting back to Earth shortly after its launch. For a time it looked as if the craft was going to hit Australia, endangering the outback not just with debris but also with the 270 grams of plutonium it was carrying as a power source. That disaster was averted when the ship sailed past the continent and plopped ignominiously into the Pacific.

Five days later, Russia sustained a less conspicuous public relations blow when officials admitted that two of the country's spy satellites had recently fallen from orbit, leaving the military without any space-based reconnaissance capabilities. What raised eyebrows was not the loss of the satellites--they weren't expected to operate indefinitely--but Russia's inability to replace them. In the wake of the Mars debacle, this was enough to cause observers inside Russia and out to wonder aloud just how deep the space program's troubles run and whether any technological solution can fix what ails it.

For Russian scientists of all stripes, the hard times began the moment the old empire crumbled. Once the pampered elite of Soviet society, chemists, physicists and other highly trained researchers currently earn as little as $100 a month. According to Lev Mukhin, a science and technology counselor in the Russian embassy in Washington, most scientists today have to hold two or three jobs to make ends meet. Just last month the head of one of Russia's prestigious nuclear-research centers wrote a letter complaining about his inability to get his projects financed or his workers paid, and then he shot himself to death.

If there has been any consolation for proud Russian scientists, it's that these problems have occurred out of sight of Western eyes. But the space agency--long a symbol of Russian technical prowess and widely considered to be the best in the world as recently as the late 1980s--could not slip so quietly into eclipse.

In recent years reports have begun to emerge from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan of gantries standing untended and unused, of costly machinery lying rusting on the ground, of abandoned spacecraft sitting forgotten in hangars. The Buran space plane, a Soviet knockoff of America's space shuttle, was unceremoniously grounded when funding ran out; a full-scale test model was shipped to Gorky Park and converted into a theme restaurant. Even the land on which the Baikonur complex sits fell into near receivership, as the newly independent Kazakhstan demanded that Russia pay an annual fee to lease the facility. "The Russians haven't paid a kopeck," says James Oberg, a space engineer and Russia watcher, "and the Kazakhs have periodically shut off the electricity to remind them that the bills are due."

Faced with such hardship, Russia has been relying on a solution familiar to entrepreneurs everywhere: when you're short of cash, use someone else's. In recent years the Mir space station has become a multicultural space club, with Russia welcoming aboard crew members from Japan, Britain and elsewhere and charging a minimum of $7.5 million a seat. The U.S. has taken this share-a-ride program further, shuttling astronauts to Mir more or less regularly, keeping them there for up to six months and paying $400 million over several years for the privilege.

Russia's unmanned craft have attracted interest too. Of the $300 million it cost to fly Mars '96, $180 million came from foreign countries that paid to have experiments carried out aboard the probe. Now the space agency plans to start carrying commercial payloads--at $50 million a pop--on its trusty Proton boosters; Lockheed Martin in San Diego, California, has agreed to act as marketing agent for these services.

All these enterprises, however, got under way before the high-profile death of Mars '96, and whether they will survive is unclear. Russia is playing the crisis down, arguing that the loss of the probe says nothing about the viability of its space agency. "Accidents happen to every program," says Yuri Milov, deputy director of the Russian space agency.

The problem is that this accident appears to have been avoidable. The Russian newspaper Izvestia has suggested that the mission might have failed not because the booster broke down but because flight controllers--working without their usual surveillance satellites--simply lost sight of it. Others blame the Mars '96 crack-up on an onboard computer that was behaving erratically before launch but, because of funding difficulties, had to be rushed into use without adequate testing. In the days leading up to the Mars launch, according to Roald Sagdeev, former director of Russia's space-science institute, the power at the space center frequently went out, and technicians had to work by the light of kerosene lamps.

As the Russian media bring problems like this to light, officials have been forced to address them, insisting that the obstacles their program faces can be overcome. "It's impossible to say our troubles have nothing to do with money," Milov says. "But we'll put things back together."

For the time being partners and customers overseas seem willing to take Milov at his word, and few have made any moves to abandon the Russians. NASA has been talking for some time about a joint, unmanned U.S.-Russian mission to Mars, tentatively scheduled for 2001, and so far the plans remain unchanged. The U.S. has also stood by its commitment to continue working aboard Mir, an international partnership that provides the Russians with much needed funds and the Americans with much needed data on the physiological effects of long-term weightlessness--critical information if NASA is ever to get its own space station off the ground.

The prospects for Russia's commercial launch program are murkier. Lockheed insists that its Proton partnership is proceeding, but while the company may still be prepared to sell Russia's launch capabilities, the marketplace--already crowded with other commercial boosters, including Europe's Ariane and the U.S.'s Delta--may not be willing to buy. Milov professes not to worry. "The demand for our launch capabilities remains high," he says.

While that may be wishful thinking, at least a few hard answers about Russia's future in space should be forthcoming in early December, when Russian and American space officials meet at Cape Canaveral to discuss their planned joint ventures. Both sides predict that the summit will be fruitful, but for the Russians it should also be poignant. While in town, they are scheduled to watch the launch of NASA's Mars Pathfinder, a probe that is supposed to land on Mars late next year and release a robot minirover. Originally, the craft was to touch down shortly before Mars '96 and set to work surveying one part of the planet while the Russian probe studied another. Now, however, it is painfully clear to NASA's former rivals and would-be partners that when America's Pathfinder reaches the surface, it will be doing its work alone.

--With reporting by Andrew Meier/Moscow and Dick Thompson/Washington

With reporting by ANDREW MEIER/MOSCOW AND DICK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON