Russia loses its positions in international space programs due to war in Ukraine – intelligence

According to Ukrinform, the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine stated this on its website.

"International anti-Russian sanctions and the unwillingness of leading global companies to cooperate with Russians in the peaceful exploration of space have knocked Russia out of the global race to colonize the Moon. Today, the United States and China are competing for supremacy. The Americans plan to land astronauts on the planet no earlier than mid-2027, while the Chinese are talking about their own taikonaut mission by 2030," the report says.

The enormous budget expenditures of the Russian Federation on the war against Ukraine, along with a shortage of technologies and equipment, have turned Russia's space industry from a favorite into a burden on the state budget.

Due to sanctions, even international commercial customers, commercial launches, which provided up to 25% of financial revenues, have turned away from Russia.

In practice, Russia today can cooperate only with countries in Asia and Africa, but even there Chinese competitors are successfully taking the remaining market share.

Roscosmos's budget last year amounted to approximately $4.15 billion; NASA's (USA) budget was $ 25.4 billion, plus $34 billion for military space programs and $6.6 billion for space meteorological programs; the CNSA (China) budget was up to $20 billion.

As noted by the Foreign Intelligence Service, with the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine, the Russian Federation deprived itself of the opportunity to participate in many international space programs.

Cooperation with the European Space Agency on the ExoMars mission to search for life on Mars has been halted; Germany withdrew from the joint Russia-Germany "Spektr-RG" project to scan the sky.

Roscosmos has also "abandoned" rocket launches from the spaceport in French Guiana. Sanctions made it impossible for NASA to participate in the joint Russia-US "Venera-D" project, an automated interplanetary station to study Venus, the launch of which was planned for 2029.

The current state of affairs in the Russian space industry was best summed up by Igor Maltsev, director of the Russian rocket and space corporation Energia: "We need to stop lying to ourselves and others that everything is fine."

As Ukrinform reported, the Russian space industry remains vulnerable to sanctions and critically dependent on foreign Earth remote sensing data, with a real risk of Russian operators being displaced by cheaper Chinese products.

Photo: Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine