Russia finally approves 10-year space plan
The announcement yesterday that Russia is trimming its space budget by 30% was actually part of the final approval of their ten-year space plan, under discussion and planning for the past two years.
Interestingly, the 30% cut was only the last reduction of many in the budget plan since it was first announced. Initially, they hoped to budget 3.4 trillion rubles for their aerospace industry over the next decade. The final budget approved yesterday is for 1.4 trillion. That’s a 59% reduction.
Considering that the reductions have forced them to abandon any plans for building a re-usable rocket, they will be increasingly hard-pressed in the next decade to successfully compete for business in the commercial market. While Russia stands still with its older designs, others will be developing new less costly ways to launch rockets. The business will go elsewhere, and they will actually have even less money to work with.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The announcement yesterday that Russia is trimming its space budget by 30% was actually part of the final approval of their ten-year space plan, under discussion and planning for the past two years.
Interestingly, the 30% cut was only the last reduction of many in the budget plan since it was first announced. Initially, they hoped to budget 3.4 trillion rubles for their aerospace industry over the next decade. The final budget approved yesterday is for 1.4 trillion. That’s a 59% reduction.
Considering that the reductions have forced them to abandon any plans for building a re-usable rocket, they will be increasingly hard-pressed in the next decade to successfully compete for business in the commercial market. While Russia stands still with its older designs, others will be developing new less costly ways to launch rockets. The business will go elsewhere, and they will actually have even less money to work with.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I bet the Russians will focus on launching infrastructure and what they are great at, such as rocket engines, Angara, the new kosmodrome and staying at the ISS. Ambitions such as an own space station, Moon missions, interplanetary probes will all be completely scrapped, I think. Until oil prices pick up again, which they might be working on over there in Syria…
which they might be working on over there in Syria…
Poor choice of a place to do it as Syria has essentially no oil or gas of its own.
In actual fact, the Russians are drawing down and repatriating most of their forces in Syria. The claim is that they have secured Bashar al Assad’s position sufficiently to now call it quits. They’ll keep the naval and air bases Assad granted them, but keep only a caretaker level of staffing at each.
I’m guessing the energy price collapse of the past year or so is biting a lot more deeply than Russia is willing to explicitly acknowledge. Their adventure in power projection beyond their borders has likely proven unsustainably expensive. Here’s hoping they quietly come to the same conclusion about their attempts at power projection on their border with Ukraine.
Poverty and confusion to the enemy!
@Dick
I see how Russia is actively working on reestablishing its economy again. I see no effort at all from the US or Europe to try anything in that direction.
Russia has established Syria as a military base to become a Mediterranean power. And Russia works well together with Iran, which has already conquered Iraq after all the US troops fled in uncontrolled panic and voluntarily left all of their weapons and monies to their worst enemies in the most humiliating defeat in the history of the world since Xerxes.
The corrupt unindustrializied corrupt stone age slavery tyranny of Saudi Arabia is dying any day now. And then Russia and Iran will go in and take over all the oil around the entire Persian Gulf. The first thing Obama did when Putin started to bomb ISIS, was to evacuate the only US aircraft carrier from the region. Saudi spends more on the military than Russia does, but Saudi is totally corrupt and incompetent so they can only lose. So totally failed and devastating is the results of the US foreign policy since the end of the cold war. The US defeated Soviet, but the end of the cold war utterly and most humiliatingly destroyed the US because of incompetence and corruption, and because of the Americans hatred against themselves, their selgenslaving “moral” beliefs of having to be the helpless victims of all the violent gangsters in the entire world. The devastating Bush-Clinton doctrine and the unmitigated disaster with millions of murders which it has resulted in. Do you want Change?
Well, “Loval”, trolling is a long-established net tradition, but you really need more class, …like having *some* semblance between what you say and what the real world is. Comparing S.A. and Russia is correct, because they are both oil-dependent rentier States. Both are corrupt enough to make the EU look good by comparison.
The idea that they are equivalent otherwise is insane. S.A. is still trying to slowly move from a tribal society where everything is a gift from the man on top of the tribes (the King, and the House of Saud), and thus corrupt by industrial standards, to a society that can support engaged participation in the worldwide networks of industrial society by their own people, …and do it without melting down into a civil war that plugs a quarter of world oil production, meanwhile fending off their own scriptural literalists’ attempts to revive the imperial Caliphate. No small task.
Russia, by contrast, has a government that is just as dependent on oil as the House of Saud, and is attempting to revive its old imperial status of power, without being named an empire in the process, in order to keep the Great Russia faction in power in the Kremlin. Any attempts to revive the Russian economy outside oil and arms sales are invisible to people watching Russia closely from outside. As the US oil wildcatters continue to make new drilling technology cheaper (fracking for shale gas and shale oil here has dropped prices steeply, and new wells are drilled at an expected price below $45/barrel today, when their bottom used to be $70/barrel) both these governments are showing every sign of continuing to lose their struggle with what industrial society calls corruption, and what they call the normal way of life.
Academia’s attempts to pull apart US society proceed apace, with one of their own in the WH for another 10 months. That, so far, has not kept privately financed innovations like “gas frack” and other more computer-oriented changes, from making oil and gas cheaper from private and State lands. They are the main reason why this year natural gas from fracking will displace coal as the top energy contributor to electricity generation in the US, even as we begin selling to Europe and Japan.
Admittedly, the academic in the WH has just aborted plans for drilling off the Atlantic Coast, ignoring scientific evaluations of the effects of drilling, but that can be reversed by the next President in 10 months. So, he bought you 10 months, but I doubt the Kremlin can use it to much good advantage. Doing so would disrupt Putin’s carefully balanced crony system inside Russia. Will we be able to reverse the “Won”‘s massive increase in cronyism here? Dunno.
Tom Billings:
>>Very insightful post. You nailed the S.A. situation quite well
additional tangent– we continue to shut down coal-fired plant’s for electric generation, seemingly in favor of “renewable’s.” I’m in Michigan & we have the lowest buffer for electric-production vs. demand, we have ever had. We couldn’t build any electrical-intensive Industry if we wanted to, the EPA wouldn’t let us & there’s just no “extra” electricity in the grid.
–The de-growth, eco-marxists that support this stuff, are addicted to electricity but don’t apparently have a clue, from where it comes.
Wayne wrote: “& there’s just no “extra” electricity in the grid.”
Politicians aren’t as smart as they think they are. They like to engineer things (e.g. Congress set design requirements for the SLS).
In California, a couple decades ago, the legislature decreed that a certain percentage of cars for sale in the state would be electrical (specifically, “zero emission”), but they forgot that there would be no additional power plants to recharge them during the hot summer days when the grid was already taxed by all the air conditioners.
To make matters worse, they restructured the power company’s business model so that it had to sell off all the power plants and it only distributed the electricity. The new power plant owners (many from out of the state) had no incentive other than price to sell inside California, so they could sell to the highest out of state bidder. The resulting fiasco caused blackouts around the state , and caused the state to spend its $10 billion surplus subsidizing the cost of buying electricity. The power company/distributor went bankrupt, leaving widows and orphans holding worthless utility stocks.
Few people bought or leased electric cars, and the requirement for them quickly disappeared.
That is central planning for you. (See also Detroit, liberalism’s showcase city — or so they declared, half a century ago, when they took it over from the people who had built it into the richest city in the US.)
Edward:
Good points.
You guys have it especially bizzaro in California, and Michigan is getting weirder by the year.
–They just closed our local coal-fired Plant, –they couldn’t make it *as-clean as Obama demands* under the new EPA regs. Where we once contributed electric to the regional grid, now we depend –in large measure– on a Plant 75 miles away.
–Just today on the local news; we could face brown-outs if our air-conditioning demand “equals or exceeds last Summers” demand,” in large part, from losing 6 coal-fired Plants in other parts of the State. (Yeah– we use air-conditioning in Michigan, not like you guys, but ‘enough.’)
Yow– Detroit! >3 hours away from me–used to enjoy a Tiger Game & The Henry Ford Museum. The place looks like a War-Zone now; square-miles of abandoned houses, shuttered Plants, & more-n-more street signs in Arabic. (Dearborn has a majority Arabic population now.) Don’t set foot in that town anymore, rather drive or take the Train to Chicago, which is also becoming a war-zone in certain parts.
Anyone who could, started fleeing Detroit, to the outer (outer) suburbs, first in 1975 & again in the late ’80’s. Basically run by democrats since the 1930’s–they bled the automaker’s dry & then started taxing everyone else to death when the big 3 started fleeing.
Interestingly– we actually have oil/gas (mainly Northern lower-Peninsula) & at one time we were in the top 10 for domestic production. The State DNR, & EPA have been going to town on restricting fracking & otherwise shutting down smaller “stripper-wells” (less than 100 barrels a day) with onerous Regulations, the past 7 years. We once had 2 large Refinery’s, both now shuttered–all our gasoline comes from a BP Refinery in Indiana– if it goes down unexpectedly, we pay $3-4/gallon instantly.
Our Governator is a self-hating RINO as well, the more he caves to the democrats, the more they hate him & the more they demand. It’s a vicious circle. (Right now, we all have to pay & be lectured at, because the People’s Republic of Flint & the EPA screwed up the water distribution system; part Cronyism & part shear leftist mismanagement, again since the 1930’s.)
oh–Michael (“comrade”) Moore doesn’t live anywhere near Flint. He once lived in Davison, an upscale, bedroom community, & he now has a HUGE house in northern-Michigan, noted for being exclusive, expensive, and “gated.”
Take the blackouts rather than the brownouts. California learned a third of a century ago that brownouts kill too much modern electric equipment. Rolling blackouts (which we had, back in the Governor Davis days just after the turn of the millennium) are inconvenient for an hour, but dead electrical equipment has to be repaired or repurchased, which takes days or longer.
I know a little about Detroit. They had Republican mayors until about 1960, and it has been “progressive” ever since. “How did one of the wealthiest cities in the country become this:”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hhJ_49leBw (13 minutes)