Space Security Index

Space Security 2011
84
annual budget for 2010 was 67-billion rubles (approximately $2.5-billion), not including
funds for the Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), which had a separate budget
allocation. 60
e ESA budget is approximately $3.6-billion per year. All member states make nancial
contributions to the Agency’s General Budget on a scale based on their GDP. 61
Civil expenditures on space continue to increase considerably in India and China, due in
large part to the growth of civil programs, including large satellites and human spaceight
programs. Since 2005, India’s space budget has dramatically increased and is now
approximately $1-billion. 62 e Chinese space budget is complex. Ocials have been quoted
as saying that the Chinese civil space budget is as low as $500-million, while media sources
place the gure closer to $2-billion. It is safe to speculate that it falls somewhere between
these two gures. 63 However, expenditures are not the sole indicator of capabilities, because
of dierences in production cost among countries, as well as local standards of living and
purchasing power. 64
Human spaceight
On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the rst human to travel into space onboard a
Soviet Vostok 1 spacecraft. e early years of human spaceight were dominated by the
USSR, which succeeded in elding the rst woman in space, the rst human spacewalk,
the rst multiple-person space ights, and the longest-duration space ight. Following the
Vostok series rockets, the Soyuz became the workhorse of the Soviet and then Russian
human spaceight program and has since carried out over 100 missions, with a capacity
load of three humans on each ight. e 2006-2015 Federal Space Program maintains an
emphasis on human spaceight, featuring ongoing development of a reusable spacecraft to
replace the Soyuz vehicle, and completion of the Russian segment of the ISS. 65
e rst U.S. human mission was completed on 5 May 1961, with the suborbital ight of
the Mercury capsule, launched on an Atlas-Mercury rocket. e Gemini ight series and
then the Apollo ight series followed, ultimately taking humans to the Moon. e U.S.
went on to develop the Skylab human space laboratories in 1973, and the USSR developed
the Mir space station, which operated from 1986 to 2001. In the 1970s, the U.S. initiated
the Space Shuttle, which was capable of launching as many as seven people to LEO. e
rst Space Shuttle, Columbia, was launched in 1981. By the end of 2008 the program had
completed 124 launches and at the end of 2010 was the only human spaceight capability
for the U.S. 66 For a time after the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, Russia was the only
actor performing regular human missions and its Soyuz spacecraft provided the only lifeline
to the ISS. is situation may recur following the Space Shuttle’s last scheduled ight in
2011 and consideration being given to future reliance on commercial providers of transport
services, though the extent to which they will become a viable alternative is still unclear.
In 2004, the U.S. announced a new NASA plan that includes returning humans to the
Moon by 2020 and a human mission to Mars thereafter. A new strategy for lunar exploration
was announced in 2006. 67 Future plans include a permanent human presence on the lunar
surface. 68 ese plans were examined in 2009 by the Review of United States Human Space
Flight Plans Committee, whose major nding was that the U.S. human spaceight program
is on an unsustainable trajectory, with the growing scope of the program outstripping the
government’s ability to fund it. In its nal report, the Committee suggests two possible
solutions to the problem of limited resources: