The leader of Russia\u2019s space corporation, Yuri Borisov, discussed his country\u2019s future ambitions in space on Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress. He spoke expansively about Russia\u2019s plans to build a new space station in low-Earth orbit, the Russian Orbital Station, as well as other initiatives.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are expecting to design, manufacture, and launch several modules by 2027,\u201d Borisov said via a translator at the conference, which is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, this year. The conference\u2019s plenary sessions are being livestreamed on YouTube.<\/p>\n
This space station will reside in a polar orbit, Borisov added, allowing it to observe the entire planet\u2019s surface. Its purpose will be to test new materials, new technologies, and new medicines. \u201cIt will be like a permanently functioning laboratory,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
During the discussion, Borisov added that Russia is also hard at work on the \u201cSfera\u201d megaconstellation to satisfy the country\u2019s large demand for communications. This constellation would include the capacity to provide direct-to-cell communications, which necessarily means that some of these satellites will be very large. Such projects cost billions of dollars at a minimum to get off the ground.<\/p>\n
In a PowerPoint slide accompanying Borisov\u2019s presentation, Roscosmos also advertised other, even grander visions. The slide showed a nuclear-powered deep space transport vehicle called \u201cNuklon\u201d and two \u201cprospective\u201d launch vehicles named Amur-LNG and Korona.<\/p>\n
It all may have looked and sounded good on the international stage, but the presentation had something of the feel of a Potemkin Village, which refers to fake villages designed to impress the Russian empress Catherine the Great two centuries ago. Put another way, most (if not all) of the presentation was based on vaporware rather than hardware.<\/p>\n
Shortly before Borisov took the stage, Russian media sources revealed that the country\u2019s budget for space activities is due to drop over the next two years\u2014rather than rise to meet the challenge of these ambitious new space programs.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
According to an article in Lenta.Ru, translated by Rob Mitchell, the proposed Russian space activity budget for 2024 will comprise 285.95 billion rubles ($2.88 billion), followed by 271.91 billion rubles ($2.74 billion) in 2025 and 258.1 billion rubles ($2.6 billion US) in 2026. The article says that \u201cthe budget allocations will be aimed in particular to advance financing of investment projects for the Russian space and rocket industry and for the functions of the Roscosmos State Corporation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Less money to build more things? Probably not.<\/p>\n
No one doubts the ability of Russia to build space stations, as the country has a long history of assembling successful orbital outposts. However, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has struggled to build new hardware for spaceflight activities. Both its Nauka space station module and Luna 25 spacecraft that recently crashed into the Moon were essentially mothballed projects largely constructed decades ago.<\/p>\n
The idea that Russia will now build a new space station and launch it within the next four years at a reduced budget is especially difficult to comprehend in the current situation. The country\u2019s main focus is on financing and fighting its unprovoked war against Ukraine, and as the space budget story shows, resources for the space program are likely to be reduced rather than increased.<\/p>\n
Every project proposed beyond the space station seems even more fanciful. Consider, for example, the Amur and Korona rockets. Russia has been talking publicly about the reusable \u201cAmur\u201d rocket for three years now. It looks similar to SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 and aims to have a reusable first stage. But there has apparently been zero progress toward developing the hardware.<\/p>\n
As for the Korona rocket shown on Borisov\u2019s slide, who knows? It\u2019s probably a reference to a single-stage-to-orbit rocket first conceived 30 years ago when NASA and McDonnell Douglas were working on the DC-X launch vehicle in the United States. The idea that Russia will resurrect this concept and develop actual spaceflight hardware is not \u201cprospective,\u201d as the Roscosmos slide claims. Rather, it\u2019s preposterous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The leader of Russia\u2019s space corporation, Yuri Borisov, discussed his country\u2019s future ambitions in space on Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress. He spoke expansively about Russia\u2019s plans to build a new space station in low-Earth orbit, the Russian Orbital Station, as well as other initiatives. \u201cWe are expecting to design, manufacture, and launch several […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45857,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9712,234,352,21],"class_list":["post-45856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-amur","tag-roscosmos","tag-russia","tag-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45856"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}