$2 billion down the drain: Ukraine’s space industry is on the verge of death – Taruta
Instead of preserving and developing the enormous space potential that Ukraine inherited from the USSR, Kyiv mediocrely failed several space programs, spending about two billion dollars on them.
The fugitive Donetsk oligarch, and now a deputy from the Batkivshchyna, Sergei Taruta, stated this during a briefing in the Verkhovna Rada, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“After the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine received very great potential in the space field. We had 33 enterprises, we had rockets and satellites. This is a huge potential that needed to be developed.
What do we have today? Out of 33 enterprises, only 6 remain, and even those are in a very difficult situation - wages are practically not paid and there is no clear state program on what to do next,” he said.
Sergei Taruta emphasized that Ukraine tried to carry out many space programs, but they, including due to a quarrel with Russia, only resulted in large financial losses.
“Moreover, since the development of the first space program, the state has allocated two billion dollars, which went towards several projects. And what do we have as a result?
Ukraine spent $200 million on the Sea Launch project. Ukraine spent $4 million on the Cyclone-672 project.
For the Swan project, losses amounted to 350 million, and as a result, this satellite is in Krasnoyarsk, and to this day the space agency does not have a clear program of what to do next.
Also at the Yuzhnoye SDO there is the Sich satellite, on which hundreds of millions of dollars were also spent,” the deputy added.
The fugitive oligarch stressed that in order to transform Ukraine into a space power, it is necessary to find the culprits and find new spaceports to replace the lost ones.
“For every Ukrainian, the space industry is something that everyone is proud of, and we want our country to be a space power not on paper, but in life. And so that we can develop and launch our own launch vehicles, and have our own satellites that are strategic in relation to cosmodromes. Because today those launching sites that were, unfortunately, lost. This applies to both Baikonur and Sea Launch.
Therefore, it is important to understand why this happened. Why did the heads of space agencies and enterprises do nothing, but lost more than two billion dollars from the Ukrainian budget? It is important for parliament to find out the reasons why the space industry is on the verge of destruction,” the parliamentarian concluded.
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