Russia talks a big future in space while its overall budget is quietly cut

The presentation had something of the feel of a Potemkin Village.

Eric Berger – Oct 4, 2023 3:13 PM | 121

Russia outlined a plan for future spaceflight activities this week. Credit: IAC/Roscosmos

The leader of Russia's space corporation, Yuri Borisov, discussed his country's future ambitions in space on Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress. He spoke expansively about Russia's plans to build a new space station in low-Earth orbit, the Russian Orbital Station, as well as other initiatives.

"We are expecting to design, manufacture, and launch several modules by 2027," Borisov said via a translator at the conference, which is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, this year. The conference's plenary sessions are being livestreamed on YouTube.

This space station will reside in a polar orbit, Borisov added, allowing it to observe the entire planet's surface. Its purpose will be to test new materials, new technologies, and new medicines. “It will be like a permanently functioning laboratory,” he said.

Megaconstellations and nuclear tugs, too

During the discussion, Borisov added that Russia is also hard at work on the "Sfera" megaconstellation to satisfy the country's large demand for communications. This constellation would include the capacity to provide direct-to-cell communications, which necessarily means that some of these satellites will be very large. Such projects cost billions of dollars at a minimum to get off the ground.

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.

It all may have looked and sounded good on the international stage, but the presentation had something of the feel of a Potemkin Village, which refers to fake villages designed to impress the Russian empress Catherine the Great two centuries ago. Put another way, most (if not all) of the presentation was based on vaporware rather than hardware.

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Shortly before Borisov took the stage, Russian media sources revealed that the country's budget for space activities is due to drop over the next two years—rather than rise to meet the challenge of these ambitious new space programs.

From Russia, with doubt

No one doubts the ability of Russia to build space stations, as the country has a long history of assembling successful orbital outposts. However, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has struggled to build new hardware for spaceflight activities. Both its Nauka space station module and Luna 25 spacecraft that recently crashed into the Moon were essentially mothballed projects largely constructed decades ago.

The idea that Russia will now build a new space station and launch it within the next four years at a reduced budget is especially difficult to comprehend in the current situation. The country's main focus is on financing and fighting its unprovoked war against Ukraine, and as the space budget story shows, resources for the space program are likely to be reduced rather than increased.

Every project proposed beyond the space station seems even more fanciful. Consider, for example, the Amur and Korona rockets. Russia has been talking publicly about the reusable "Amur" rocket for three years now. It looks similar to SpaceX's Falcon 9 and aims to have a reusable first stage. But there has apparently been zero progress toward 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 30 years ago when NASA and McDonnell Douglas were working on the DC-X launch vehicle in the United States. The idea that Russia will resurrect this concept and develop actual spaceflight hardware is not "prospective," as the Roscosmos slide claims. Rather, it's preposterous.