Last November, Russia launched a widely anticipated mission to
the Martian moon Phobos. The craft would gather samples from the
moon’s surface to help determine if future space crews could
obtain valuable supplies of oxygen there en route to Mars. For
Russia, the mission was supposed to mark a “cavalry charge” that
would redeem a quarter-century of interplanetary impotence.
Instead it turned into a cosmic humiliation when the craft died
shortly after takeoff and fell back to Earth. Phobos was part of
a series of recent disappointments for Roscosmos, the Russian
space agency. Last August a Progress supply ship headed for the
International Space Station crashed. Just a week before, an
expensive, new-model communications satellite was lost because
of a guidance coding error, and early in 2011 another military
satellite was sent into an improper orbit, possibly for a
similar reason. The overall track record of Russian space
launches is still not significantly different from that of other
spacefaring nations, and