Russian Space Industry To Receive $69 Billion Through 2020

An anonymous reader sends word that the Russian Space industry will be getting a big boost over the next eight years. Prime Minister Medvedev has approved $68.71 billion in space-related funding from 2013 to 2020. That's a huge increase from the $3.3 billion spent annually in 2010 and 2011. The increased funding is one of several efforts to restoring Russia's slowly fading spaceflight capabilities. "The failure of a workhorse Proton rocket after launch in August caused the multimillion-dollar loss of an Indonesian and a Russian satellite. A similar problem caused the loss of a $265 million communications satellite last year. Medvedev criticized the state of the industry in August, saying problems were costing Russia prestige and money." Medvedev said, "The program will enable our country to effectively participate in forward-looking projects, such as the International Space Station, the study of the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies in the solar system."

Comments

Receiving $69 billion?

[uvajed_ekil]

Russian Space Industry To Receive $69 Billion Through 2020

That's what she said.

Receiving 2.1 trillion roubles

[G3ckoG33k]

The Reuters article referred to 2.1 trillion rubles:

"Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a plan to spend 2.1 trillion roubles ($68.71 billion) on developing Russia's space industry from 2013 to 2020, state-run RIA news agency reported."

A lot of money in any case.

Re:Receiving 2.1 trillion roubles

[cnettel]

A dollar sign in international text is frequently assumed to be USD. It's certainly not "[mentioning] no currency".

Re:Receiving 2.1 trillion roubles

[priceslasher]

What's aggravating about the summary is the comparison of 1 years budget to 7 years of budget. It is still a 3x increase in budget, from 3.3 billion to roughly 9.9 billion.

echos of the 90s

[vlm]

In the 1990s the rich west used to blow money over to the Russians to give them something to do, so they didn't have to work for middle easterners. Proliferation and all that.

In the 2010's, the rich Russians will be blowing money our way, to make sure our unemployed NASA guys won't have to work for middle easterners. Same deal, cut back on proliferation.

$69 billion is a sexy number

[arcite]

Too bad $60 billion of that will be siphoned off to slush funds and other nefarious activities.

knowledge

[Nerdfest]

That's a lot of money for space research. . Do they know something we don't?

Re:knowledge

[fragMasterFlash]

They know that the privately funded space industry is growing and could potentially surpass state run space agencies one day unless they continue to innovate. I am guessing the Soviet space program would rather license technologies they develop to private industry rather than simply fade away into the history books.

Re:$69 billion is a sexy number

[RCL]

And Russia is full of corruption, so GP's comment is spot on.

DISCLAIMER: I am a Russian citizen.

Discipline first

[RCL]

Throwing more money at it won't help if they don't increase the discipline. I bet those rocket losses were caused by bad/missing QA in supply chain and overall negligence, which seems to be omnipresent in Russian society at large. I'm not that old, but I remember Soviet times when the discipline was much higher. Nowadays, my compatriots borrowed Western relaxed way of life but unfortunately haven't borrowed Western attitude to work and Western responsibility for its quality.

That's HALF of NASA's budget

[Khopesh]

That's a lot of money for space research. . Do they know something we don't?

What are you talking about? No it is not!

They use some of that money for manned space missions rather than for research. Still, their previous $3 billion annual budget could afford to send men to space while NASA's $18 billion annual budget apparently cannot. Now Russia announces a spending increase up to USD$68.71 billion over eight years (USD$8.59b a year), roughly half of what NASA's sliced up budget is currently.

Neil deGrasse Tyson's video pleas We Stopped Dreaming and its follow-up A New Perspective proposed we increase NASA spending to 1% of the US Federal Budget (current spending: 0.49%) suggests we could go to Mars and innovate the way we did in the 70s. That's significantly more than Russia's new investment and would help us keep our lead. Otherwise, we're losing both innovation and innovators.

I'd like NASA to be funded by the largest of:
* 1% of the US Federal Budget ($3.8t -> $38b in 2011)
* Half of the US DOD's Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation budget ($79b -> $39b in 2010)
* 5% of the whole US Military budget ($550b -> $27b in 2011, $708b -> $35b in 2012)

This extra funding would come from otherwise allotted military spending (so an increase to the military budget would typically increase NASA's budget as well). As I noted a few paragraphs earlier, this would roughly double the current $18b budget and would bring us to Mars.

Re:$69 billion is a sexy number

[crutchy]

without russia the ISS would be a floating piece of space junk (which wouldn't eventually burn up in the atmosphere)

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Federal_Space_Agency
"Due to International Space Station involvements, up to 50% of Russia's space budget is spent on the manned space program. Some observers have pointed out that this has a detrimental effect on other aspects of space exploration, and that the other space powers spend much lesser proportions of their overall budgets on maintaining human presence in orbit."

russian space agency budget 2012: $5.2 billion
nasa budget 2012: $17.8 billion

russian success is soyuz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_program) and proton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Proton_launches)
these programs are as close to mass production for spacecraft as any country has ever come, and i can only imagine that russian engineers and technicians have kept it going under pretty harsh conditions

NASA has JPL, and but even that is now mostly scientific studies