Post-Soviet adjustments space station in 1998 The space industry of the
Soviet Union was a formidable, capable and well-funded complex, which scored a number of great successes. Spending on the
space program peaked in 1989, when its budget totaled 6.9 billion rubles, amounting to 1.5% of the Soviet Union's gross domestic product. During the
perestroika period of the late 1980s, the space program's funding began to decrease, and this was seriously accelerated by the economic hardships of the 1990s. The
Russian Federation inherited the major part of the infrastructure and companies of the Soviet program (while others, such as
Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, became
Ukrainian), but found itself unable to continue the appropriate level of financing. By 1998, the space program's funding had been cut by 80%. To coordinate the country's space activities, on 25 February 1992, the
Russian Federal Space Agency was created. During Soviet times, there had been no central agency; instead, the design bureaus had been very powerful. To an extent, this continued during the first years of the agency, which suffered from a lack of authority while the design bureaus fought to survive in the difficult environment.
The crisis years In 1993, the most prestigious program of the industry, the
Buran space shuttle, was canceled. It had been worked on for 20 years by the industry's best companies, and the cancelation immediately resulted in a 30% reduction in the industry's work force. 300,000 people worked in the industry at the end of 1994, down from 400,000 in 1987, and the space program's funding now amounted to just 0.23% of the country's budget. The space industry's physical infrastructure declined greatly, and this was symbolised by a roof collapse in 2001 at the
Baikonur Cosmodrome which destroyed the Buran shuttle which had flown the one and only flight of the program in 1988. No funds were available to look after the shuttle's hangar in Baikonur and it collapsed on the shuttle in May 2002. Since 1994, the Proton has earned $4.3 billion for the Russian space industry as a whole, and in 2011 this figure is expected to raise to $6 billion. Another successful company was
NPO Energomash, whose extremely powerful
RD-180 engine was installed on American
Atlas V rockets. The rocket's manufacturer
Lockheed Martin initially bought 101 RD-180 engines from Energomash, earning the company $1 billion in hard currency.
New federal space plan satellite, produced by
Reshetnev Information Satellite Systems In the early 2000s, during
Vladimir Putin's presidency, the Russian economy started recovering, growing more each year than in all of the previous decade. The funding outlook for Russia's space program started to look more favourable. In 2001, the development of the
GLONASS satellite navigation system was made a government priority with the introduction of a new Federal Targeted Program. The main contractor for GLONASS,
NPO PM (later renamed ISS Reshetnev), thus received a boost in its finances. In total, 4.8 billion rubles was allocated for the space program in 2001, of which 1.6 billion was earmarked for GLONASS. By 2004, Russia's space spending had grown to 12 billion rubles. In 2005, a new strategy for the development of the country's space program, titled the Federal Space Plan 2006–2015, was approved. It stipulated the completion of the
International Space Station, development of the
Angara rocket family, introduction of a new crewed spacecraft and completion of the GLONASS constellation, among others. In the mid-2000s, funding of the space program continued to improve substantially, amounting to 21.59 billion rubles in 2005 and rising to 23 billion rubles in 2006. In 2007, 24.4 billion rubles was spent on the civilian space program, while the military space program's budget was 11 billion rubles. The industry also continued to receive very substantial funds from exports and foreign partnerships.
2013 reorganization of the Russian space sector As a result of a series of reliability problems, and proximate to the failure of a July 2013
Proton M launch, a major reorganization of the Russian space industry was undertaken. The
United Rocket and Space Corporation was formed as a
joint-stock corporation by the
government in August 2013 to consolidate the Russian
space sector. Deputy Prime Minister
Dmitry Rogozin said "the failure-prone space sector is so troubled that it needs state supervision to overcome its problems." Three days following the Proton M launch failure, the Russian government had announced that "extremely harsh measures" would be taken "and spell the end of the [Russian] space industry as we know it." == Structure of the industry ==