The Russian Federal Space Program for 2006-2015 has been recently adopted, and soon Roskosmos is to select for implementation a design for the manned spacecraft of the future. Therefore, the first few questions to the head of Energia are about the company's future prospects in the current "time of change".

What is your vision of RSC Energia's role in the environment where the industry is being concentrated and large integrated associations are being set up?

Energia corporation implements large integration projects in the manned, unmanned and rocket propulsion systems. To do this, the corporation cooperates with many of this country's companies and organizations, including those in other industries, putting to use their scientific, technical technological and production potential.

The forms of the integration may vary from the usual cooperation with subcontractors to the merging of organizations. But decision-making on this subject must take into account organizational and economic usefulness.

At present the Corporation includes the Prime Design Bureau, Experimental Machine-building plant, Kosmos airlines, Volzhskoye design bureau in Samara, Razvitie investment company, orthopedic enterprise OIME, etc.

Will not the fact that the company works simultaneously in various fields of space technology result in competition inside the industry?

There needs to be a competition inside the industry for contracts to provide rocket and space products and services, any attempt to do without it would eventually result in technological regress. However, it needs to be controllable. For each type of rocket and space products there must be at least two suppliers, in some cases there must be three. If only one were left, a technological lag would set in, because in that case there would be no competition to win the contracts, and thus there would be no incentive to raise the technological level and improve the cost efficiency of the products.

A good example is the Russian breakthrough in space communications. In 1997-1998 the Russian Government made a decision to hold a state competition for communications satellites development. This international competition was won by two Russian companies: Energia (with its Yamal-200 project) and NPO of Applied Mechanics (NPO PM) with its project Troika.

This mobilizing effort eventually resulted in RSC Energia developing an orbital constellation based on the new-generation communication satellites Yamal, and NPO PM developing its production capability and switching their production to the new-generation satellite model Express-AM.

It is owing to this competition that today our country has in geostationary orbit a state-of-the-art constellation of civilian communications satellites, while as recently as five years ago it was still in danger of being completely lost.

For the rest of this Energia report please click here. Contains detailed charts, images and captions.

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Rocket Science News at Space-Travel.Com

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