Roscosmos restructure: Russia’s federal space agency Roscosmos is to be turned into a state corporation by the second half of 2015 as part of a drastic reform of the country’s ailing space industry, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin announced last week. The new entity will coordinate all elements of Russian space activity and will introduce “acompletely different [level of] accountability for performance,” PM Dmitry Medvedev confirmed.
Russia’s space program has been plagued by corruption scandals and reports of financial mismanagement over the past several years, which Rogozin blames for a string of dramatic spacecraft disasters since 2010, the two latest being the failure of the Progress 59 cargo spaceship to dock with the International Space Station, and the crash in Siberia of a Proton-M carrier rocket carrying a Mexican satellite.
“It will take maybe another two to three years to re-equip the rocket and space industry,” Rogozin said, warning that Russia risked losing its 40% share of the global commercial satellite launch market to new firms emerging from the United States (such as the California-based SpaceX) if it could not get its act together
Roscosmos restructure planned with Russian space industry in crisis
Source: The Moscow Times