MOSCOW. Oct 9 (Interfax-AVN) - The budget of Russia's federal space exploration program for 2016-2025 may be reduced to 1.5 trillion rubles, a source in the country's rocket and space sector told reporters.
"At first, Roscosmos (Russian Federal Space Agency) was instructed to decrease its spending on the new Federal Space Exploration Program from 2.4 trillion rubles to two trillion rubles. Then they set the limit at 1.8 trillion rubles. And now they ask us to 'tighten our belts' to 1.5 trillion rubles," the source said.
The final ceiling of budget funding for the sector will be announced next week, and Roscosmos will have to review the draft federal space exploration program and curtail extra projects. The deadline for submitting this document to the Russian government for consideration is October 28.
In the spring of 2015, Roscosmos presented its draft federal space exploration program with a budget of 2.4 trillion rubles, of which 250 billion rubles were expected to arrive from non-budget sources. The draft document envisaged the development of a new manned spacecraft, four unmanned missions to the Moon, the construction of several modules for the International Space Station (ISS), as well as efforts to further develop Russia's orbital constellation of satellites.
In 2014, Roscosmos began drawing up an ambitious space exploration program with a budget of 2.8 trillion rubles. In addition to the projects mentioned in the 2015 draft document, this program proposed creating additional modules for the ISS, including an 'inflatable' one, creating a national high-latitude orbiting station, preparing to build a Lunar orbiting station, designing a new Lunar roving vehicle, a robot cosmonaut and a super-heavy space rocket, establishing a center to monitor space debris and asteroids, and manufacturing equipment to clean up space debris in orbit.