![Russia outlined a plan for future spaceflight activities this week.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Russian-plan-800x453.jpg)
IAC/Roscosmos
The leader of Russia’s space corporation, Yuri Borisov, discussed his country’s future ambitions in space on Tuesday on the International Astronautical Congress. He spoke expansively about Russia’s plans to construct a brand new space station in low-Earth orbit, the Russian Orbital Station, in addition to other initiatives.
“We predict to design, manufacture, and launch several modules by 2027,” Borisov said via a translator on the conference, which is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, this 12 months. The conference’s plenary sessions are being livestreamed on YouTube.
This space station will reside in a polar orbit, Borisov added, allowing it to watch your complete planet’s surface. Its purpose will probably be to check recent materials, recent technologies, and recent medicines. “It’s going to be like a permanently functioning laboratory,” he said.
Megaconstellations and nuclear tugs, too
Through the discussion, Borisov added that Russia can be hard at work on the “Sfera” megaconstellation to satisfy the country’s large demand for communications. This constellation would come with the capability to offer direct-to-cell communications, which necessarily signifies that a few of these satellites will probably be very large. Such projects cost billions of dollars at a minimum to get off the bottom.
In a PowerPoint slide accompanying Borisov’s presentation, Roscosmos also advertised other, even grander visions. The slide showed a nuclear-powered deep space transport vehicle called “Nuklon” and two “prospective” launch vehicles named Amur-LNG and Korona.
All of it could have looked and sounded good on the international stage, however the presentation had something of the texture of a Potemkin Village, which refers to fake villages designed to impress the Russian empress Catherine the Great two centuries ago. Put one other way, most (if not all) of the presentation was based on vaporware quite than hardware.
Shortly before Borisov took the stage, Russian media sources revealed that the country’s budget for space activities is resulting from drop over the following two years—quite than rise to satisfy the challenge of those ambitious recent space programs.
In keeping with an article in Lenta.Ru, translated by Rob Mitchell, the proposed Russian space activity budget for 2024 will comprise 285.95 billion rubles ($2.88 billion), followed by 271.91 billion rubles ($2.74 billion) in 2025 and 258.1 billion rubles ($2.6 billion US) in 2026. The article says that “the budget allocations will probably be aimed specifically to advance financing of investment projects for the Russian space and rocket industry and for the functions of the Roscosmos State Corporation.”
Less money to construct more things? Probably not.
From Russia, with doubt
Nobody doubts the flexibility of Russia to construct space stations, because the country has an extended history of assembling successful orbital outposts. Nonetheless, because the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has struggled to construct recent hardware for spaceflight activities. Each its Nauka space station module and Luna 25 spacecraft that recently crashed into the Moon were essentially mothballed projects largely constructed many years ago.
The concept Russia will now construct a brand new space station and launch it inside the following 4 years at a reduced budget is particularly difficult to grasp in the present situation. The country’s predominant focus is on financing and fighting its unprovoked war against Ukraine, and because the space budget story shows, resources for the space program are more likely to be reduced quite than increased.
Every project proposed beyond the space station seems much more fanciful. Consider, for instance, the Amur and Korona rockets. Russia has been talking publicly concerning the reusable “Amur” rocket for 3 years now. It looks just like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and goals to have a reusable first stage. But there has apparently been zero progress toward actually developing the hardware.
As for the Korona rocket shown on Borisov’s slide, who knows? It’s probably a reference to a single-stage-to-orbit rocket first conceived of 30 years ago when NASA and McDonnell Douglas were working on the DC-X launch vehicle in the USA. The concept Russia goes to resurrect this idea and develop actual spaceflight hardware just isn’t “prospective,” because the Roscosmos slide claims. Fairly, it’s preposterous.