International sanctions and the outflow of technology have thrown Russia out of the global space race. While the US is preparing a mission to the Moon by 2027, and China by 2030, the Russian space industry is struggling in a crisis and is forced to limit cooperation only with certain countries in Asia and Africa. This was reported by the Foreign Intelligence Service, writes UNN.
Huge expenditures of the Russian budget on the war against Ukraine and a lack of technology and equipment have turned the Russian space industry from a favorite into a burden for the state budget. Due to sanctions, even international commercial customers (commercial launches), which provided up to 25% of financial revenues, turned away from the Russians.
It is noted that in practice, Russia today can only cooperate with countries in Asia and Africa, but even there, Chinese competitors are successfully taking the last. The budget of "Roscosmos" for last year was approximately $4.15 billion, NASA (USA) - $25.4 billion, plus $34 billion for military astronautics and $6.6 billion - for space meteorological programs, the CNSA (China) budget - up to $20 billion.
With the beginning of the full-scale war against Ukraine, Russia deprived itself of the opportunity to participate in many international space programs. Cooperation with the European Space Agency on the search for life on Mars ExoMars has been stopped; Germany has left the joint project with Russia "Spektr-RG" for scanning the sky. Also, "Roscosmos" "refused" to launch rockets from the cosmodrome in French Guiana. Sanctions made it impossible for NASA to participate in the joint project with Russia "Venera-D" - an automatic interplanetary station for studying Venus, the launch of which was planned for 2029.
Igor Maltsev, director of the Russian rocket and space corporation "Energia", best summarized the current state of affairs in the Russian space industry: "We need to stop lying to ourselves and others that everything is fine with us."