Russian space officials face threats of fine and criminal prosecution due to the failure of several projects, particularly the Phobos-Grunt mission, the most ambitious Mars mission so far.

"The latest failures are hitting hard at our competitiveness. This does not mean that anything fatal happened. It just means that we have to do a detailed flight assessment and punish those responsible," President Dmitry Medvedev said in a nationally televised speech Saturday.

Toward the end of 2010, Russia's already troubled space industry was further shaken by the failure of the Proton rocket sending a trio of GLONASS satellites, costing more than $138 million, to crash down into the ocean. This was followed by the failed launch of a rocket booster which left a new-generation Geo-IK-2 military satellite in a useless orbit.

In August, the agency suffered the loss of the Ekspress-AM4 communications satellite and the unprecedented crash of a Progress cargo ship heading to the International Space Station. Then came the Phobos-Grunt fiasco, which cost the Russian people US$163 million.

According to author Anatoly Zak, the Phobos-Grunt mission, advertised as the nation's return to planetary exploration, "proved to be another mismanaged project, exactly as insiders had warned." Zak wrote in russianspaceweb.com that despite widespread knowledge of the project's deficiencies, top Roskosmos officials gave the green light to the doomed launch.

Zak reported that according to his sources within the industry, the latest round of purges at Roskosmos was expected to start Monday.