-Valentin Petrovich Glushko

I agree with the second part, but I think that we had plenty of innovation until the Space Shuttle, which was the last truly innovative spacecraft system until Blue Origin and SpaceX created the tail-landing reusable booster.

I consider the geostationary satellite innovative, despite the concept being two decades old before it was first employed. Several innovations were required to put man on the Moon, such as rendezvous and docking (there is plenty of counterintuitive and non-obvious things that must be done to accomplish both of these); guidance, navigation, and control between orbits, orbital planes, and planets; multiple use engines that relight several times; and space suits that allow people to work outside the spacecraft and on the lunar surface. Space stations were innovative, even though they, too, were imagined decades earlier, but were not the rotating version that Disney and Von Braun imagined. Finally, the reusable spacecraft, the Space Shuttle, was innovative, but it was more expensive to operate, launched less often, and was only capable of shorter missions than expected. Congress and NASA should have improved upon this concept rather than regress to Apollo-Saturn style vehicles.

Making multi-module space stations did not seem as innovative.

Other modern innovations by private companies include the dramatic reduction in launch costs, especially a ten-fold reduction for small (500 Kg) satellites. Starship looks to be on track to not only beat the originally-intended launch price of the Space Shuttle, but it seems to be able to beat the launch rate, too. The intended mission time for Starship is also several times greater than the Space Shuttle’s original one-month mission time. Modern innovations are improving upon four-decade-old capabilities and technologies.

Book recommendation: Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin. Sad!! :)

I bet Putin everyday is briefed on the Russian Oil & Gas giant Rosneft.
In contrast, Roscosmos is most likely far down on his list of priorities, and it made sense to me that Putin recently cut 16% from the RosCosmos budget.

That would be a shame, and it makes me think of the book 2010 by Arthur C. Clarke.
In that book Americans & Russians worked together on a mission to salvage the spaceship Discovery and investigate the mysterious “monolith”.

Well, if in the near future, Space Cooperation is not meant to be, then we should at least say to our Russian Space ‘comrades’ – “So Long and thanks for 120+ RD-180 Rocket Engines.”.