Russia's would-be Mars mission is dead. Phobos-Grunt was an ambitious project aimed to return samples from the Martian moon Phobos, but Russian operators never got it to fire its engines and head to our neighboring world. As the mission's launch window to Mars closed, the European Space Agency finally threw in the towel on trying to communicate with the failed probe on Friday. NASA couldn't reach it, either. Any further attempts to contact the spacecraft will be done to try to find out what wrong, and to steer the craft's eventual plunge back to Earth so that it falls into the ocean (and doesn't drop a toxic load of propellant into an inhabited area.)

But as new information on the program and the management culture at the Russian space agency Roscosmos comes to light, it now appears that we should have been surprised if the mission had succeeded. If reports coming out now are true, Phobos-Grunt was riddled with last-minute problems that should have been fixed before it launched. This is unsettling news for NASA, which, with the retirement of the space shuttle, is now reliant on the Russians to get humans into orbit.

According to Russian Space Web, an independent site that track's Russia's space program, after the Phobos-Grunt launch vehicle was fueled at the launch pad, inspectors found that the cables for the steering controller were reversed. Then, either because the engineers had no time or no provisions to defuel the craft, they simply resoldered the cables without defueling the vehicle, the report says. That's against standard safety procedures, as the propellants can ignite merely on contact with each other. Worse, Russia discovered other issues that couldn't be solved by rewiring, but only by frantically rewriting software with no time to test it before launch. Nevertheless, the appropriate Russian state commission gave the go-ahead.

Why didn't they simply delay the mission? Because launch windows to go to Mars occur only every 26 months or so—the synodic period when Earth and Mars repeat the planetary alignment needed to make the mission affordable. If Russia hadn't flown its Mars mission in November, it wouldn't have had another shot until early 2014. So either the commission that approved the November launch didn't know about all of the problems, or its members decided to simply roll the dice.

Beyond these last-minute issues, the history of the Phobos-Grunt mission shows Russia's space agency working uphill from the very beginning. The spacecraft was developed hastily, partly because of the launch-window issue. That can be done, yet as the old saying goes: of cost, schedule, and quality, you can pick only two. The Apollo program was built well, and quickly, because of President Kennedy's end-of-the-decade deadline. So the U.S. had to give on cost, which is why Apollo cost a fortune.

But, it seems, the Russians didn't have the budget needed to safely drive such an ambitious schedule: For example, to save money, the Phobos-Grunt project had no dedicated prototype for electric and radio tests, unofficial sources say. As a result, all testing of electrical systems had to be conducted in a facility that featured only a limited number of onboard systems, with most components represented by mockups and prototypes. And because most components were still undergoing upgrades, their prototypes often didn't reflect their actual performance. As a result, the final phases of testing and upgrades had to be conducted on the actual components of the flight vehicle, thus delaying the scheduled start of integrated tests of the fully assembled flight vehicle.

Lastly, the blueprints for some flight components began arriving only in December 2010. As a result, the manufacturing and welding of some elements dragged until summer. In demanding a strict schedule with inadequate funding, Roscosmos sacrificed quality, which meant the work and resources invested in the flight ended up wasted.

While NASA had no particular investment in Phobos-Grunt, the apparent reasons for the mission's failure raise some troubling questions about the state of Roscosmos. Reading between the lines, it's clear that, like NASA's failures with the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle accidents, there was a culture in which people were afraid to deliver bad news of any kind, even when bright red lights were flashing. Roscosmos had just undergone a major management shakeup after the two failed launches in late summer, and has a new head. Russian president Medvedev recently suggested that there might be criminal penalties for failure, even invoking Stalin (though only to point out that the old dictator would have been much harsher).

Management by fear, inadequate budgets, and impossible schedule milestones don't add up to a recipe for success. And with the retirement of the shuttle, the space agency is now dependent upon the Russians not only for lifeboats on the International Space Station, but also rides to and from orbit. The Soyuz spacecraft that's now carrying our astronauts has a decades-long success record, but if the problems with Roscosmos aren't fixed, there are troubling implications for future astronaut safety. For one thing, the Soyuz vehicle has a new digital flight-control system that was tested for the first time on an actual crewed flight this year, and there have been several recent problems with the Soyuz, both on launch and entry.

Meanwhile, NASA's plan to boost American private space companies as a way out of depending upon Russian launches has hit its own snags. Last month Congress appropriated less than half the 2012 budget request of $850 million for the Commercial Crew Program, and the agency hasn't yet figured out what the total impact on the program will be, but it will push back the schedule by at least two years (which will cost $450 million per year in ongoing payments to the Russians for transporting American astronauts).

Given the troubling situation with our ISS partners, Congress might want to consider moving some of the billions they appropriated for a giant rocket that NASA didn't request, and that will do nothing to end our dependence on the Russians, to properly fund commercial crew. This will not only save money in the longer run and reduce the risks created by outsourcing our orbital flights to Russia, but would also revitalize American human spaceflight as quickly as possible.

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