“Russia’s cosmonauts prepare for letdown”, LA Times, 10/4. A rather gloomy account by a reporter who was given a (paid) tour of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, portraying it as a mordant and run-down place. Cosmonaut Yurii Baturin had some pointed remarks about the space program:
Yuri Baturin is the only cosmonaut authorized to speak with reporters. He has cotton-white hair, tinted glasses and the calm presence of a man who, after two voyages into space, has lost the capacity to worry over details. You ask him about the Russian program and prepare yourself for exuberance.
Instead, Baturin pauses and sighs.
“This is a very difficult and painful question, because it’s not very proper to criticize your own government, especially in a foreign newspaper,” he says. “But our politicians who talk about the space program don’t understand a thing about it. I state today that Russia does not have a real space program.”
You remember when you’d just gotten to Moscow and your Russian-language teacher mentioned Yuri Gagarin. She stared, stupefied, at your blank face, as if contemplating whether she could teach her language to a cretin who didn’t recognize the name of the first man to soar into space.
And now here you are, eyeball to eyeball with an heir to Gagarin’s heroic legacy, and the more he talks, the more disappointed he sounds.
“Our space agency for several years is not calling the tender for a new ship,” he says. “They don’t know what for and where to fly.”
And: “The politicians don’t understand the complexity of the task. They announce Russia will land on Mars by 2030, which creates the illusion that Russia has a mission to Mars… [but] the government should not just try to be the first to put a flag on Mars.”
Finally: “Space tourism is only harmful to the Russian space program, in my opinion. In the corridors here you can find dozens of cosmonauts who would have accompanied a flight in the past seven years but didn’t because their seat was occupied by a tourist. It leads us into a dead end.”
[…]
Later, you’ll try to figure out whether what he said was true: whether, behind the screen of extravagant political statements, high-rolling space tourism junkets and U.S. dependence on Russia for lifts to the space station, there is a vacuum of purpose and projects. You ask around, and others agree.
“Unfortunately, we can’t say right now that Russia has a powerful space program,” Igor Marinin, editor in chief of Space News magazine, says when you call. “For a very long time we simply lived on the verge of extinction.”
“Russia to start flight-testing new cargo spacecraft in 2016-17”, 13/4, RIAN/Space Daily. Announcement by Energiya chief Vitalii Lopota on the spacecraft-rocket transport system to be designed by Energiya for Roskosmos’ Advanced Crew Transport System (PPTS). The spacecraft is to be launched at the Vostochnyi, Восточный space center (near Uglegorsk in the Amur region of eastern Russia), this to be completed in 5 years and operational in 2015.
