The lack of tracking may make corruption and embezzlement easy and common, but the point that the speaker was making is that the Russians charge “all the traffic will bear” without knowing whether they are making or losing money. They charged their first space tourist around $20 million, but they are now charging NASA three times that much per astronaut taken to the same ISS — yet they do not know whether they are charging enough to break even.

They do the same with commercial launches for satellites. They may be subsidizing commercial launches, but it seems to me that this may be worth that expense to keep their rocket scientists, engineers, and technicians proficient. That they are planning to reduce the number of rocket types suggests that they may be learning some of the lessons learned by free-market capitalist companies about efficiency and effectiveness.

Hopefully, they will learn to *prevent* corruption rather than detect it after the fact. Corruption is always a poor use of scarce resources.

Whoops. Thank you. Post fixed.

Missing “million”?