Will failed test end the Bulava program?

Yesterday BarentsObserver published the photo of the Bulava missile that shortly after launch from the submarine “Dmitri Donskoy” in the White Sea failed to find its ballistic path and went into a spiral. The giant spiral shaped a light that could be seen in the horizon from northern Norway.

Wednesday’s launch is the seventh failed launch of the prestigious missile, supposed to be deployed on the Russian navy’s fourth generation strategic submarines of the Borei-class.

In Thursday’s edition of the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta the journalist and defence expert Victor Myasnikov writes an analytical overview of the development and fails of the Bulava missile program. He estimates the total costs of the Bulava program to be a minimum of $3 billion, or about 100 billion rubles.

The full-scale designing of the Bulava missile program started ten years ago. It was a parallel design of both the land-launched missile and the submarine-launched missile, supposed to be cheap and unified, Myasnikov writes.

He continues by describing what went wrong regarding the testing and development of Bulava in the following years. The huge development and test costs are taken from the navy’s budget and by that lead to limited means for other naval tasks, like new vessels.

By the end, Myasnikov conclude that the logical step after yet another failed launch would be to close the project and to forget about it as a bad dream. But, as he writes, that will likely not happens because the Bulava program has many defenders and lobbyists among generals and admirals, in addition to the missile manufactures and the designers of the Borei-class submarine supposed to carry the Bulava missile.

BarentsObserver follows the missile program with a special Bulava section.