Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has unveiled plans to consolidate the country’s satellite and rocket designers and manufacturers in to a single corporation, the United Rocket and Space Corporation.
Rogozin made the annoucement in a…
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has unveiled plans to consolidate the country’s satellite and rocket designers and manufacturers in to a single corporation, the United Rocket and Space Corporation.
Rogozin made the annoucement in a working meeting with President Vladmir Putin on 9 October. The proposals were the conclusion of the commission set up to examine the Russian space industry in the wake of the July failure of the Proton rocket carrying three Glonass satellites.
Rogozin told Putin, “We propose consolidating the designers and manufacturers of the main types of rocket and space technology by bringing them under the umbrella of a single corporation – the United Rocket and Space Corporation, which could be established as a public limited company.
“We believe that this model would enable us to implement a common technical policy within the future corporation and keep the plants busy with orders. At present, the plants are using only around 40% of their capacity, and this is why we are seeing problems with wages and orders. Industry consolidation and mobilising industry resources, along with developing competition and design work will produce the results we need.
“We have drafted all of the needed documents. If you approve them, the Government and the Military-Industrial Commission are ready to start carrying out this plan.”
Putin pushed his deputy prime minister on how such a model would be implemented in practice, to which Rogozin responded, “The model we chose is based on cross-financing of projects, both those related to defence procurement needs, and civilian space programme projects.
“In order to speed up the process, we propose setting up the United Rocket and Space Corporation using the Russian Institute of Space Device Engineering as the base. This is an already functioning organisation and it has the necessary resources for us to be able to transfer to it shares in the rocket and space industry’s companies.”
He added that research and ground-based space infrastructure would remain under Roscosmos’ responsibility. Indeed, Rogozon said that the Russian space agency, that has been so heavily criticised over the past year, would still have a role to paly in the country’s reformed space efforts.
“We propose keeping Roscosmos as the federal executive body responsible for acting as system integrator and state purchaser for the programmes that industry will carry out. Certainly, we will need to clarify the agency’s work objectives, powers and activities, and bolster its human resources capability.”
Both Putin and Rogozin have expressed concerns over the manageability of the Russian space industry and the latter believes that the best way to address that is to consolidate and centralise the industry.
He argued: “If we want to make the sector manageable, we need to eliminate duplication. At the moment, we have various companies in the sector concentrated in ten integrated organisations, and there is also a mass of organisations that operate independently outside these integrated structures.
“Each of them works according to their own plan and uses their own component base. In other words, universal technical and technology solutions hardly get considered at all.
“If we place the sector within a unified organisational framework, we would be able to carry out a common technical policy. That is to say, instead of having all these different companies ordering different items, we could organise one-window public procurement orders, which would centralise the system and save us a lot of money.
“Furthermore, the biggest problem is the component base. The various components make up 95% of any satellite. In order to avoid depending on component imports – and we both know that this is a highly competitive sector and some countries apply export controls that essentially make it impossible to import all the necessary components – the new system would enable us to concentrate resources and scientific potential on developing our own component base for space and defence needs.”
Russian business daily Vedomosti quoted the now former Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin as saying it would take around a year to create the United Rocket and Space Corporation.
While newspaper Kommersant has reported that the current chief executive of the Lada car maker AvtoVaz, Igor Komarov, is in prime position to be appointed as head of the new company.
Popovkin dismissed as Roscosmos chief
Vladimir Popovkin, the embattled head of the Federal Space Agency Roscosmos, has been dismissed. He is being replaced by Colonel General Oleg Ostapenko, who was previously the Russian Deputy Defence Minister.
On 10 October, president Putin signed an executive order releasing Ostapenko from his duties as a minister and dismissing him from military service. By the end of the day, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree appointing Ostapenko as the new head of Roscosmos.
Medvedev stated: “You’ve been engaged in the space industry all your life including at the military posts. Now you are set to be involved with space in a slightly different dimension. No doubt that this topic is complex and requires greater attention from the state.”
The move brings an end to Popovkin’s turbulent two-and-a-half years in charge which saw a series of Proton failures and a damning assessment that the space agency had only launched 47.1% of the required number of satellites into orbit between 2010 and 2012.
On 2 August, Popovkin was officially reprimanded by Medvedev for reasons unclear.
