What is the science and technology focus for Russia, military weapons?

Russian prime minister puts manned launches at top of space priorities Anonymous. BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union. London: Sep 9, 2009.

[Article by Yuriy Yuryevich Karash, US doctor of sciences (PhD) with the specialty "Space politics and international relations," candidate of historial sciences, corresponding member of Russian Cosmonautics Academy Named for K.E. Tsiolkovskiy: "Cosmonautics Is in With Chance. But There Is Danger That It Will Evaporate in Vertically Integrated Structures"]

Addressing a conference in Novo-Ogarevo 25 August, Premier Vladimir Putin made two very important statements concerning the country's national space rocket sector and, consequently, Russia's scientific and technical potential as a whole, since this sector is a key factor in the development of the country's high technologies.

First, the premier emphasized that, despite the economic difficulties, funding for space activities will remain among the budget priorities. In 2009 approximately 82 billion roubles will be allocated to purposes of research and space exploration. Second, the chairman of the government defined three promising areas of this activity -manned cosmonautics, production of spacecraft for booster rockets, and the provision of services in launching space freight.

Such a distribution of priorities marks a departure from the tradition whereby the country's leadership put in first place not manned cosmonautics but applied, unmanned cosmonautics (satellites for resolving various kinds of economic and defence tasks and commercial launches). The fact that the main emphasis is now being placed on the creation of inhabited space complexes and craft attests that the country's leadership has become aware of the importance of preserving and developing the kind of space activity which is key to Russia's science and technology and to its image and in which our country is still the world leader. However, the way in which Russia intends to maintain this leadership gives rise to questions.

It is obvious that the further production of space stations and the creation of the next generation of spacecraft without the existence of tasks which would justify their development and building will lead to the degradation of cosmonautics. In the final analysis this will lead to loss of interest in it on the part both of the president and the government and of Russian society. Consequently, it is necessary to design and manufacture fundamentally new models of manned space hardware. However, it will be impossible to do this until we have defined the strategic aims of Russian cosmonautics to achieve which this hardware will be created.

For some reason this obvious truth was not aired at the conference, although it is the lack of such aims that prevents a radical boost from being given to the further development of cosmonautics. Instead, the premier criticized the Federal Space Agency for delays in creating vertically integrated structures of a holding type -delays connected with the land issue.

What is understood by the land issue is the registration of enterprises' rights to property, which takes as long as 2.5 to three years, and what is understood by vertically integrated structures is the chain of production and design enterprises and organizations, in which the chief link (and, at the same time, the managing company) is some head enterprise. At the same time Vice Premier Sergey Ivanov pointed out that it is not a question of creating state corporations, thereby emphasizing that these holding companies will be aimed at making a commercial profit.

However, it is here that a contradiction lies. Under modern conditions manned cosmonautics is capable of surviving and developing mainly only thanks to state support. Since rare flights by space tourists presently constitute the sole substantial commercial return on this kind of space activity, private capital is not interested in any substantial investment in this sector of cosmonautics. Thus, if commercial holding companies become the basis of the Russian space sector, manned cosmonautics will simply die out for lack of funding.

We must be clearly aware of the fact that manned cosmonautics is aimed at resolving primarily national, state tasks and, consequently, is capable of surviving and developing only thanks to strong state support. At the same time this support certainly does not contradict the basic postulates of liberal economics.

Speaking about the management of the US space programme, Academician Boris Chertok once said: "The most capitalist country in the world, despite Marxist teaching about production anarchy, despite the notorious democratic principles of the free market and private initiative, has created the world's mightiest state organization (NASA -Yu.K.), which draws up nonmilitary space programmes and coordinates and controls the activities of all the country's organizations in the sphere of cosmonautics."

However, the creation of an analogous system to manage the space sector in Russia is justified only if this sector resolves tasks that are capable of cardinally elevating science and technology and the country's image. It is the defining of these tasks, not the creation of vertically integrated structures, that must constitute the first step on the way to restoring to cosmonautics the role of the locomotive of the development of the country's high-tech complex.

Credit: Nezavisimaya Gazeta website, Moscow, in Russian 28 Aug 09