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The Head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, said that ill-wishers have spent about $2 million on negative publications about Russia’s space Industry in the media.
“They have spent so much money on such nonsense,” Rogozin said adding that he was well aware of who exactly it was beneficial to.
According to Rogozin, the campaign was an attempt to settle personal scores with him by some people. They were allegedly upset by Rogozin’s efforts to get the budget under control preventing violations and criminal activities.
He added that ex-employees of enterprises dismissed as part of the fight against corruption were behind the information attack discrediting Roscosmos.
“They threw the money they stole into the media to discredit the industry as a whole and me personally,” the Roscosmos head noted.
Rogozin became the head of Roscosmos in May 2018. Since then, the department has been involved in multiple media scandals, including corruption cases and several missile launches failed. The Russian top leadership has openly criticized the leadership of the state corporation for inefficient spending and slowness in the construction of the second stage of the Vostochny cosmodrome. Another issue is constant delays of the key space programs.
These scandals and corrpution cases caused a large-scale criticism of the company and its leadership in both social media and Russian-language media organizations.
Rogozin is the head of Roscosoms and in the framework of the Russian tradition of vertically-integrated management, he does have full responsibility for the complicated situation in the key Russian space company. At the same time, many local Russian observers note that Rogozin’s personality has changed notably, with an increasing number of negative tendencies, over the last 10 years.
In this situation it appears strange how the leadership of Roscosmos tries to blame a wide-scale coverage of obvious issues in the Russian space industry on some staged media campaign. The only group of people that needs $2 million to cover such obvious topics is budget suckers from mainstream media outlets.
Even if the ‘attack’ took place, remarks of Rogozin are less-than-prompt response to the crisis. The leadership is to prevent crises or react to crises during their development. After the creation and revelation of corruption schemes, they appear in the sphere of competence of law enforcement bodies.
Nonetheless, the anti-corruption efforts uncovered by recent media reports and government statements could be a positive signal because they could contribute to the creation of effective management models in the Russian space industry.
An interesting point is that the US space industry is facing issues similar to those of the Russian one. The effectiveness of several key progress (for example, the long-delayed second moon-landing program). According to NASA, the agency is going to return humans to 2028. In early 2019, Vice President Mike Pence moved up the target date from 2028 to 2024. However, there are significant doubts in the expert community that this objective could be achieved.
Experts involved in scientific foresight in the 1970s-1980s hardly expected that humans would return to the Moon not earlier than in 2024-2028.
