MOSCOW. Nov 21 (Interfax-AVN) - The federal space program spanning 2006-2016 implies spending 26 billion rubles ($975.15 million) on scientific studies, deputy head of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) Yury Nosenko told the press on Tuesday.
"It is planned to assign 305 billion rubles ($11.44 billion) for the implementation of the federal space program over a ten-year period, with 16% of the sum, about 266 billion rubles ($9.98 billion), to be spent on scientific space research," he said.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, Russia's position in space exploration has significantly weakened, he said.
While in 1966-1989 the Soviet Union implemented 39 launches of scientific spacecraft to study other planets and other solar-terrestrial objects, in the 1990s Russia launched only five such probes. Of these, the most expensive project, the Mars-96 spacecraft launch, failed, Nosenko said.
By 2001, Russia had lost its entire fleet of scientific space vehicles due to chronic under funding and stagnation in space science, he said.
The recently adopted federal space program provides for reviving scientific studies in space. For instance, the first scientific spacecraft Coronas-Foton is to be launched after long delays, he said.