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Rockets and People
parity was achieved and treaties had been concluded for the reduction of strategic
offensive arms.
In a struggle for personal power, new statesmen—without asking the permission
of their people—destroyed the Soviet Union with a swiftness that not even
its most ardent enemies could have dreamed.The collapse of the Soviet Union led
to the creation of “sovereign” states that were not concerned with the fate of
cosmonautics.They were no longer in the mood for Energiya and Buran. In spite
of the efforts of the leading enterprises, which had developed proposals for the
practical use of the very rich resources on hand from the Energiya-Buran system,
all operations were terminated.
russia is the legal heir of the space programs and achievements of the Soviet
Union. Over the last decade of the twentieth century, Russian cosmonautics virtually
had no state support. According to various estimates, the amount of actual
funding from the Russian state budget for the rocket-space industry was between
0.05 and 0.01 percent of the amount it received in the mid-1980s.The new Russian
governments that came to power and rapidly replaced one another proved to
be incompetent and did not want to assess and claim their very rich intellectual
and technological legacy. But then they quickly assessed the tremendous value of
our natural resources and legalized their plunder with impunity. An enormous
safety margin enabled our cosmonautics to survive under conditions of general
systemic crisis; economic crisis; and ideological, moral, and spiritual crises.
The new government leaders were in a great hurry to reject previous political
and social doctrines, and together they discarded our enormous experience in state
planning and the organization of the economy. In exchange, neither a new strategy
nor new prospects appeared. A significant portion of the rocket-space enterprises
were organizationally combined under the management of the Russian
Space Agency (RKA).This saved them from the threat of greed-driven privatization
and plunder.The aviation industry did not act fast enough to carry out a similar
self-organization at the State level. Under the threat of the total destruction of
the domestic aviation industry, the latest Russian government handed over the
surviving portion of this industry to the space agency. The RKA was converted
into the Russian Aviation and Space Agency (RAKA or Rosaviakosmos). 30
Modern cosmonautics has acquired vital military strategic importance. The
military doctrines of the United States for the twenty-first century stipulate
fundamentally new methods for conducting future “local” wars. Space navigation,
space “omniscience,” communications, and data transmission and control play a
defining role in them. During the times of the Soviet Union, our military-space
and missile forces, in terms of their potential capabilities, nearly matched similar
American forces.
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30. In 2004, Rosaviakosmos became the Federal Space Agency.