Russia will spend 670 billion rubles ($21 billion) to develop its space industry in the coming years, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Monday.
"This is big money, you must not let a significant part of it be blown away," Medvedev told a government meeting in his Moscow region residence Monday but did not give the exact timeframe for the expenditure.
Russia has earmarked about 200 billion rubles ($7 billion) for space programmes in 2011, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said. Putin said Russia would develop a whole range of new capabilities over the next five years. Read more
50 years after Gagarin, Russian space research cries out for funding
Russian science is aiming high - but 50 years after Yury Gagarin's legendary space flight, the funding for space technology is lagging behind. The modernisation pushed by President Dmitry Medvedev has prompted a flurry of investment into the Skolkovo Innovation Centre, and cutting-edge industries such as nanotechnology are benefiting from high level backing. Read more
After two decades of Russia's apparent lost interest in cosmic exploration, space is back. There is a simulated mission to Mars, a spacecraft programme destined to outlive Nasa's, and now a £54m museum designed to acquaint the post-Gagarin generation with Moscow's interplanetary heritage.
According to a Russian Space Forces official, Russia plans to launch eight satellites and two intercontinental ballistic missiles from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia.
Since the 1950s, the Plesetsk Space Centre has launch of 1,549 space rockets, 1,979 satellites, and carried out 473 test launches of ICBMs.
The Russian orbital space group will have more than 70 spacecraft by 2015 under to a draft federal space program for 2006-2015, an official from the Federal Space Agency said. According to the official, there are currently 33 spacecraft in the orbital group. The program, which will be discussed Thursday at a government session, envisaged putting into orbit a series of communications and TV broadcasting satellites, meteorological satellites, research spacecraft, and also two Sterkh spacecraft for Russia to participate in the international search and tracking system. The official said the program saw developing and replenishing the current orbital group as a priority. The program also includes developing a reusable spacecraft, the Kliper, together with European countries and promising launch vehicles such as the Angara and Soyuz-2, and also the Fobos-grunt project to take samples of subsoil from a moon of Mars, Fobos. Another priority of the program is to support and develop the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) and maintain ground infrastructure, above all, major launching sites such as Baikonur in Kazakhstan and Plesetsk in northern Russia. This would be Russia's third federal space program. The first one was completed in 2000, and the second is finishing this year.