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Moscow (AFP) March 3, 2010 Russia faces a shortage of candidates to be cosmonauts as fewer Russians than before are showing an interest in going to space, the head of its space training centre said on Wednesday. Following icons like Yuri Gagarin into space has been a traditional dream of young Russians but now interest is falling, said Sergei Krikalyev, the head of the training centre, based in Star City outside Moscow. "Now there are around 40 cosmonauts in the Russian ranks. New recruitment is planned but there are fewer people interested than we would like," he said according to the Interfax news agency. Krikalyev lamented that interest had fallen in the two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union and also expressed concern that among all of Russia's cosmonauts there was currently only one woman. This contrasted with the numbers of women working as astronauts for US space agency NASA, he said, noting that there were far more women working in the US air force than in Russia. Krikalyev also complained that the funding for the training centre -- a legendary facility dating back to the early space age -- needed to be "doubled to keep it functioning properly." "For the centre to develop, it needs to be increased several times more," he added, quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency. He said financing was needed for repairs at the centre, parts of which "have not been refurbished for 20 years which look like they have been shelled." Young people were also shunning the prospect of working at the centre, a place where "many work more for the idea than for money," he added. Russia's space programme has faced dwindling funding after the fall of the Soviet Union, which put the first satellite into orbit and the first man into space. To make ends meet, it has even shipped highly-paying space tourists for brief trips to the International Space Station (ISS). But with the shuttle due to be taken out of service, NASA will for the next years be reliant on Russia's Soyuz launches for its own manned space programme. Krikalyev is himself a cosmonaut legend: a veteran of six space flights he was famously in space in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, returning to earth the next year as a citizen of a new Russia after a marathon mission.
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Russian space memorabilia goes to auctionOttawa (AFP) March 2, 2010 A spacesuit worn by cosmonaut Anatoli Artsebarsky, pieces of Soyuz shuttles that rocketed into space and a Mir Space Station control panel are among dozens of Soviet space program items for sale this month in Canada. "The quantity of items associated with the Soviet space program, items that were used for research and ground testing and some that actually went into space that are to be sold ... read more |
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