Russian Space Industry To Receive $69 Billion Through 2020 64
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."
Receiving $69 billion? (Score:4, Funny)
Russian Space Industry To Receive $69 Billion Through 2020
That's what she said.
Receiving 2.1 trillion roubles (Score:3)
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.
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The Reuters article referred to 2.1 trillion rubles
Same thing, right? As long as a common, changeable currency is mentioned, there is nothing wrong with translating it into a form people understand, no? I for one would have had no clue what to make of a figure stated in rubles, while US Dollars make sense to most North Americans, Europeans, and others without them having to look up currency conversion factors.
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The summary mentioned no currency so it could have been LEGOs, which I understand is better than gold.
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The summary mentioned no currency...
It said "$69 Billion" in English, using what could be taken as an American dialect, on a US-based site, so that is pretty clearly indicative of United States dollars. Sorry if there was no fine print or legalese to explicitly explain details, but it looked rather obvious anyway.
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Same thing, right?
Yes, but it kills the innuendo value in the figure.
At least, that's what I pulled out of the comment.
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Lets put it in perspective. 10 billion a year. Lots of money to burn on rockets.
Or 1/10 of Russia's military budget for the same time period. two times less than promised increase in military expenditures. less than 3% of federal budget for 2011.
Given than budget is funded by exports of natural resources, I would say that they expect slight increase in oil/gas prices and bigger profit margins.
Space travel is fascinating, but it causes less worries for politics than health care
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echos of the 90s (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Maybe you already know this but many important people in science and math are and were Christians.
That probably results from the fact that for the most of the history of science, our understanding of nature was actually pretty lousy. How many important people in science have been Christians since *real* science took off, somewhere at the beginning of the 20th century?
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Plenty of great scientists have been Christians. However thats an irrelevant an aside. Throughout history great people have done great things in spite of their religious affiliations. Its like the classic 'Stalin was an atheist' argument level by other irrational people of faith, just an irrelevant aside used by people who prefer arguing from emotion.
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Many atheists are very happy using such reasoning to blame religion for acts of evil
Sometimes it's right to ascribe acts of evil to a religion, especially if the religion actually commands its adherents to do so.
but unwilling to use the same reasoning when it comes to atheism.
Perhaps because atheism doesn't command you to do anything? When atheists commit evil acts, it's for other reasons. Stalin didn't commit acts of evil because he was an atheist, he committed them because he was a psychopathic crackpot. Many psychopathic crackpots actually happen to be theists, mind you.
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Well, except that he wasn't. Stalin was even a seminarist of the orthodox faith.
$69 billion is a sexy number (Score:5, Insightful)
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Russia actually builds stuff that goes to space.
NASA is guilty of feeding an enormous bureaucracy full of academic studies, failed projects and priority backflips.
Q: What do you think $69 billion would get you in NASA?
A: Budget complaints, and not much else.
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DISCLAIMER: I am a Russian citizen.
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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 hum
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re: "(which wouldn't eventually burn up in the atmosphere)"
haha i mean would
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GLONASS is currently operational ( http://www.sdcm.ru/index_eng.html [www.sdcm.ru] ) , it is second operational global navigation system after US GPS, so you can call it a success.
Most relatively new GPS chips support GLONASS, so it is already used in consumer devices (for example Iphone 4S and 5) increasing positioning accuracy in cities with tall buildings and another situations where open sky view is limited.
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Given the mark-up tacked on to anything in earth orbit, NASA could probably be sourcing them from Harbor Freight and they still wouldn't want to drop one...
Read it wrong... (Score:1)
At first, instead of "billion," I read "bitcoin."
I was surprised, to say the least.
knowledge (Score:3)
That's a lot of money for space research. . Do they know something we don't?
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...or americans
Re:knowledge (Score:4, Interesting)
Build a space economy first (Score:2)
Agreed, except that the Soviets have been history for over two decades now.
Even the current $3 billion budget would be more than enough for a private space company to develop a new launch system, provided the amount is focused on the right projects. I suspect a good part of the amount is taken up by the bureaucracy and deep space missions that fail.
While interplanetary research is good, I'd prefer a focus on near-Earth missions geared toward the exploitation of space or at least the development of a more se
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Even the current $3 billion budget would be more than enough for a private space company to develop a new launch system, provided the amount is focused on the right projects.
$3 billion is more than enough for anyone to develop a new launch system, provided the amount is focused on the right projects. The hard part isn't private vs public, the hard part is finding the right focus.
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They know that if they manage to create a good rocket, there will be a huge return on their investment. There's lots of money in LEO, especially when competition is limited.
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That's a lot of money for space research. . Do they know something we don't?
Well, if they don't now, they will in a few years time.
That's HALF of NASA's budget (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [youtu.be] and its follow-up A New Perspective [youtu.be] proposed we increase NASA spending to 1% of the US Federal Budget (current spending: 0.49% [wikipedia.org]) 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 [wikipedia.org] -> $38b in 2011)
* Half of the US DOD's Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation budget ($79b [wikipedia.org] -> $39b in 2010)
* 5% of the whole US Military budget ($550b [wikipedia.org] -> $27b in 2011, $708b [wikipedia.org] -> $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.
Discipline first (Score:3)
In related news, (Score:2)
The number of orders at Lamborghini and Ferrari has just doubled for the next few years. Keep in mind that at least half (if not two thirds) of this money will inevitably be stolen. That's just how "business" is done over there. IRS would have a field day discovering the discrepancies between what folks officially make, and what they actually spend.
Meanwhile, in the US (Score:2)
...the U.S. military budget is projected to be nearly 870 billion in 2013.
charges US astronauts a billion a launch? (Score:2)
is there some unwritten rule (Score:1)