Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has sacked the boss of space agency Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, the Kremlin announced Thursday, as the once world-beating program falls behind its competitors in the space race.
The replacement pick is Dmitry Bakanov, an ex-deputy minister in the transport ministry who previously also ran Russia’s Gonets communication satellite program.
While Moscow’s space program has stuttered over recent years, it does still try to pull off spectacular missions. In 2023, Roscomos failed to land the Luna-25 probe on the south pole of the moon, eventually losing to India in the race to reach the resource-rich area of the lunar surface.
Since the Kremlin launched its war on Ukraine in early 2022, cooperation with its Western allies on space has been dramatically scaled back.
The International Space Station will be retired shortly after 2030 and Russia has signaled it may desert the orbital outpost before that, while Roscomos pulled its engineers out of Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana after the war started, leaving expensive rockets behind.
However, space cooperation has become a key part of the Kremlin’s partnership with North Korea, and American intelligence has touted the possibility of Russia positioning a nuclear weapon in orbit. Russia is also a junior partner in China’s program to build a lunar base.
The ousted Borisov only replaced Dmitry Rogozin — a key Putin ally who sparred with Elon Musk on X — as director general of Roscosmos in 2022.
Politico
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