More budget cuts expected for Roscosmos
According to one story in the Russian press today, the Russian space industry, run by Roscosmos, is expected to experience more budget cuts due to a shortage of funds.
The Russian federal space program might face cuts as the Roscosmos state corporation is likely to suffer funding shortages amounting to 150 billion rubles (almost $2.4 billion) in the next three years, a source in the industry told Sputnik.
“The shortages of budgetary funds planned for allocation to Roscosmos from the previous parameters for the next three years is about 150 billion rubles … the lack of funds has already become a reason of delays in the development of interplanetary projects, slowing down construction of the second stage of the Vostochny Cosmodrome and the development of new rocket and space equipment,” the source said.
The shortfall almost certainly comes from a lack of international launch customers, most of whom have shifted their business to SpaceX because of the quality control concerns in the Russian aerospace industry. Whether Russia can regain any of this business in the coming years will depend wholly on whether they can demonstrate some reliability in their launch cadence, something they have failed to do for the past five years.
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
According to one story in the Russian press today, the Russian space industry, run by Roscosmos, is expected to experience more budget cuts due to a shortage of funds.
The Russian federal space program might face cuts as the Roscosmos state corporation is likely to suffer funding shortages amounting to 150 billion rubles (almost $2.4 billion) in the next three years, a source in the industry told Sputnik.
“The shortages of budgetary funds planned for allocation to Roscosmos from the previous parameters for the next three years is about 150 billion rubles … the lack of funds has already become a reason of delays in the development of interplanetary projects, slowing down construction of the second stage of the Vostochny Cosmodrome and the development of new rocket and space equipment,” the source said.
The shortfall almost certainly comes from a lack of international launch customers, most of whom have shifted their business to SpaceX because of the quality control concerns in the Russian aerospace industry. Whether Russia can regain any of this business in the coming years will depend wholly on whether they can demonstrate some reliability in their launch cadence, something they have failed to do for the past five years.
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
On May 23, Robert linked to the following article, which has a chart in Figure 1 showing that from 2010 through 2012 Russia owned about half the commercial market, Europe (Arianespace) owned 1/3, and China and Sea Launch the remaining 1/6.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/22/spacex-leading-the-space-race-to-launch-humans-to-mars.html
The chart also shows that so far in 2018 Russia owns only 1/12 of the commercial market, SpaceX almost 2/3, and the rest (just over 1/4) to Arianespace. This is a dramatic change in less than a decade.
Of course, there are other launches (military and civil), but they tend to be driven by political or national motives. Commercial launches tend to show how well a rocket or company performs (price, availability, quality/reliability). As space becomes more commercialized, these performance factors become more important, as they determine how quickly a company can get itself started or expanded in its niche.
SpaceX has done well in its performance and seems to have found a way to develop rockets and spacecraft quickly without breaking the bank (11 years from founding to first commercial launch). Few others have managed to do this, Rocket Lab (12 years, if the next launch is successful as its first commercial launch) and Orbital Sciences (8 years) being the only companies that come to mind. Jordi Puig-Suari’s and Bob Twiggs’s cubesat concept is the satellite equivalent of fast and cheap, mainly due to standardization.
So where did Russia go wrong?
I would say that it was when they decided to get away from competition and entrepreneurship by consolidating its space industry under a central governmental control. Even Arianespace, which has a similar centralized-government-control problem, was able to make some adaptations to SpaceX’s competition.
This latest Russian development is yet another example of capitalism in space, as it shows that a socialized space program fails just as does any socialized economic system, but a free market capitalist space company can excel due to competition and entrepreneurship.
This is at least the third major resource cutback for Russian space announced in as many years. It seems unlikely to be the last.
Russia, as a whole, is in an irreversible demographic death spiral. A century hence, it will have a smaller population than present-day Germany or France.
The effective death of its space program will come long before the formal demise of Russia as a nation-state, though. Russia’s once large commercial launch business is all but gone and, once ISS is shut down, its human space program will have no destination. Satellite launches for various organs of the Russian state will continue on existing rockets, but no new vehicles are going to appear. Russia’s space program will be limited to no more than maintenance of existing Earth-orbit constellations as soon as the mid-2020’s.