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Transcript of Briefing on Russian Space Sanctions Against United States
Briefing by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and Head of the Federal Space Agency Oleg Ostapenko on International Space Cooperation

Transcript:
Dmitry Rogozin, Oleg Ostapenko,

...
Dmitri Rogozin: Mr Ostapenko will correct me if I’m wrong, but I think about one third of our total space programme budget goes to manned space exploration – the ISS, that is. It’s a huge amount of money, of taxpayer money. We’d like to look ahead, beyond the horizon. As a matter of fact, manned space exploration, as we know it today, involves two inseparable segments – American and Russian. Specialists from the Russian Space Agency will confirm, as they’ve reported to the Government, that the Russian segment – strange as it may seem – is capable of of operating independently from the US, but not vice versa. That’s a feature specific to the station.

Second, Russian rockets will remain the only means of delivering astronauts to the International Space Station for the next few years. The United States has no such spacecraft, and so dependence on Russia for extending the work of the ISS, although mutual, is larger for the United States. As for Russia, we should adopt a very pragmatic attitude. We must determine our direct and indirect gains from the ISS, the research projects we can implement there, what our cosmonauts would do at the station, and the benefit-cost ratio.

So, we respect the work of the Federal Space Agency in this sphere. It has reported that in the near future, or more precisely this summer, it would forward new plans to the Government for prospective exploration projects in near and outer space. Mr Ostapenko is working on these projects in cooperation with the Advanced Research Foundation. After 2020, we’d like to use these and the intellectual and production resources for the implementation of more forward-looking space projects. These could even be international projects, but it would be us who would choose our partners and decide with whom to cooperate in near and outer space exploration.

Question: Interfax. Mr Ostapenko, you said Russia would carry out all the planned commercial spacecraft launches in 2014. Has anything changed? Are there any problems with foreign spacecraft launches?

Oleg Ostapenko: There were some obstacles, because launch licences had not been issued for 2014, 2015 and 2016. As of now, the licences for 2014 have been issued. What is our reasoning? We do have licences for spacecraft launches in 2014. But considering that our partner is not reliable, as Mr Rogozin has said, we are also considering the worst case scenarios. We will keep working in Russia to resolve this issue, and we will also carry on our cooperation with NASA and the European Space Agency.
Posted by: 3dc 2014-05-14
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=391135