On February 26, 2022, General Director of the Roscosmos State Corporation Dmitry Rogozin took part in the broadcast of the Solovyov Live YouTube channel, during which he explained the corporation’s position and further actions in connection with the new international situation, the Roscosmos press service reports.
Roscosmos decided to evacuate specialists from Russian rocket and space industry enterprises from the Guiana Space Center so that they would not become hostages of sanctions against Russia. According to Rogozin, the European side will suffer from these sanctions, first of all, because the European Union does not have any other rockets, except Soyuz-ST, for launching European Galileo navigation satellites from the GCC: “Their Ariane-6 rocket, which will come to shift, will appear in two or three years.”
The international market for launch services no longer exists due to sanctions bans on interaction with Russia. The head of the State Corporation emphasized that this did not happen because someone became more competitive than Roscosmos: “Our Russian rockets are the most reliable, we have been flying for three and a half years without a single accident. We have brought order to our industry. We fly safely. Everyone is falling: the Americans are falling, the Chinese have problems, they have had accidents. We fly reliably. This is the best sign of quality that you can imagine… Nevertheless, our partners are prohibited from commercially interacting with Roscosmos, with Russia.”
Russia will be able to purchase the necessary microelectronics for spacecraft, which are not produced in the Russian Federation, from China. In addition, Dmitry Rogozin noted that today no country in the world produces the entire range of microelectronics, not even the USA. He also promised to solve the problem with microelectronics for the Russian cosmonautics.
The German side notified that it would turn off its telescope on the Spektr-RG space observatory, which is a joint project with the Russian Federation. “The German partners were instructed to turn off one of these two telescopes, which they themselves control,” Rogozin noted. According to the head of Roscosmos, technical specialists from Germany are very worried, since for them this is a blow to their professional credo.
On the issue of the ISS project, NASA sanctions against Russian cosmonautics will not be used.