Russia Wants To Lead In Space By Spending Less Money On It
Putin says Russia needs to return its leadership in space exploration, TASS
“Russia should make many steps forward to return its leading positions in space exploration, Russian President Vladimir Putin said during his Q&A session on Thursday. “These technologies are developing and they are developing very actively and are being commercialized very actively and in this sense we must make many steps forward, including with regard to the quality of satellites and the quality of equipment. We must return and firmly keep our competence and leadership in launches,” the Russian president said.”
Russia’s Rapidly Evaporating Space Program, earlier post
“Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev agreed to slash funding for Russia’s space programme by 30 percent on Thursday, an effort to reign in state spending in the face of a deepening economic crisis.”
Sounds like exactly the plan the SLS/NASA haters want too!
Since when does not liking SLS translate into hating NASA? SLS is not a perfect system that people are going to blindly say is great because NASA is developing it. I have long been a supporter of most of what NASA is doing. I just think SLS is an obsolete approach to heavy lift that is too expensive and too slow to develop. That doesn’t make me hate NASA.
“I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.”
The SLS “haters” would rather see that money better spent by NASA on things like lunar landers, lunar rovers, lunar bases, and etc.
While the rest of the launch industry is moving towards reuse, SLS has gone back to the 1960s with an all expendable design. SLS is already obsolete before its first flight.
That’s an interesting conclusion given that a great number of us SLS haters would like to see NASA have a bigger budget. Not liking SLS is not synonymous with hating NASA. Far from it. We want to see NASA excel and make best use of its core capabilities.
No, hating SLS is only synonymous with hating NASA in a binary world built on bad assumptions.
There’s plenty of room in America these days for every hating flavor.
Russian mission statement for space (actually, for anything):
“Ve naut hauppy, unteel Yu naut hauppy”
Putin is only engaging in the age-old political tactic of telling the people what they want to hear despite what the reality of the situation is. He’s been touting ‘Make Russia Great Again’ to keep himself propped up in power all while he and his oligarchs have been plundering the spoils of the Russian economic switch to more of a market economy.
The reality is Russia is beginning to really suffer economically from the pressure of sanctions and increased military spending. And once the United States finally gets its act together and starts launching astronauts on our own rockets again, no more NASA paying for Soyez rides. The cuts for the Russian space programs is a reflection to that reality, despite what Putin tells his people.