Vladimir GerdoTASS via Getty Images
The leader of Russia’s civil space program seems to be increasingly detached from reality. In recent months, Dmitry Rogozin, the boss of Roscosmos, has given a series of interviews, in which he has made all sorts of big promises about the supposed bright future of the Russian space program.
For example, in an interview published just today, Rogozin made the fantastic claim that his country’s space program has the technical means to reach Mars and land cosmonauts there within eight to 10 years. If Russia is ready to fund such a plan, Rogozin guarantees that Roscosmos is ready to deliver.
Russia, Rogozin said recently, is ready to reuse better then SpaceX and the United States. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, he said, is only “semi-reusable”, and Russia is striving to build a 21st-century rocket capable of 100 flights. He then reiterated that Russia would like to develop a version of its Soyuz missile that has a methane-powered engine.
SpaceX has flown its Falcon 9 first-stage Falcon five times five times, and it plans to launch 10 times after using each booster. It is not clear what, if any, steps Russia has taken after reuse. The reality is that Russia depends on reliable but decades-old technology to enter space. And although Rogozin talks a good game about sending his cosmonauts to the moon or to Mars, and about competing with SpaceX over giant rockets, this seems to be mostly bluster.
Budget cuts ahead
Roscosmos has a relatively meager budget to carry out its civilian space activities. Its funding for civic programs in 2020 is 176 billion rubles, equivalent to $ 2.4 billion; that’s about a tenth the level of NASA funding. In addition, there are reports that the Russian Ministry of Finance wants to substantially reduce Roscosmos’ budget, by 20 billion rubles a year for the next three years.
According to a Russian source from the space industry, this 11 percent cut would affect “financing the production of newly launched cars and advanced space technologies.” This means that Roscosmos can not see funding for any of the types of programs that Rogozin is effectively talking about.
In a revealing interview with The Wall Street Journal published this weekend, a Siberian-born physicist named Mikhail Kokorich talks about how he fled Putin’s Russia after co-founding Dauria Aerospace in 2011. Dauria was the first private space company set up in Russia, but the Soviet-era approach proved to be too boring there, Kokorich said. After moving to the United States, he founded Momentus Space.
Kokorich offered this breathtaking, first-hand assessment of national prominence in space: “The US is absolutely number one, then the European Union, then China,” he said. “Next, I think India is now compared to Russia, and perhaps even more advanced than Russia in a broader sense.”
