Russia Adding $50 Billion To Space Effort 130
An anonymous reader sends news that Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled today a new $50 billion effort to maintain and extend the country's space capabilities. Part of this initiative is a new spaceport located in Russia, which will lead to the first manned launches from Russian soil in 2018. Manned launches currently originate from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
"The Russian space programme has been hurt in recent years by a string of launch failures of unmanned probes and satellites, but Putin vowed Moscow would continue to ramp up spending. He said that from 2013-2020, Russia would be spending 1.6 trillion rubles ($51.8 billion, 38 million euros) on its space sector, a growth far greater than any other space power. 'Developing our potential in space will be one of the priorities of state policy,' Putin said at a meeting in the regional capital Blagoveshchensk. ... speaking to Canadian spaceman Chris Hadfield, currently commander of the ISS, Putin hailed cooperation in space which meant world powers could forget about the problems of international relations and think 'about the future of mankind.'"
5% growth or even less! (Score:2, Interesting)
Considering $51.8bn is going to be spent during 7 years then it is less than 5% growth per year.
Keeping in mind the inflation, there is no groowth at all!
Re:the summary is more appropriately (Score:5, Interesting)
The USSR was, for lack of more appropriate descriptor, the swinging dick of technology and science
Not quite. The Soviets pwned the rest of the world from the beginning of the Space Race through the mid/late '60s. But after that, the US threw more and more money at it until it won hands down. Viz. the Apollo program and space shuttle program, which the USSR couldn't match. (The Buran and exploding rockets [wikipedia.org] don't count.)
Elsewhere, the Soviets stayed strong competitors to the West in science and technology up into the '70s but then they ran into an area of tech that they just couldn't compete in: computers. The Soviet economy had prioritized guns over butter for decades, so computing research went into big iron and military needs. Once the Western free markets began to realize economies in scale on microcomputers, the Soviets had no mechanism to match it and they were left in the dust. There's a lot of great anecdotes about this in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Dead Hand. [amazon.com]