As the launch Crew Dragon changed the global balance of power.

Popularizer of cosmonautics Vitaly Yegorov told how the launch of the spacecraft Crew Dragon private American company SpaceX has changed the balance of power in the space race where Russia is now and what prevents it to do, as Musk writes “the New newspaper”.

Why it is important to launch the Crew Dragon?

Every day there are new manned spacecraft. In fact, previous new appeared in 1981, the year is “Shuttle”. Was another “Senjou” Chinese. For world space important any spacecraft new — and here especially: the whole country back into space. Moreover, the country that currently has the most advanced space program, the largest funding in the space. Well, in fact, was one ship that took people to the International space station, was two ships. Accordingly, the presence of humanity in space is now doubled.

9 years for such a development is a little or a lot?

For a company that never did it, 9 years is a normal period. The space it is in principle not rapid, and, in General, pilocarpine Astronautics order of magnitude more responsible. If the satellite lost — well, Yes, it is money this time, what are the opportunities lost. People, of course, to lose is wrong. With manned space flight demand much more stringent. A more stringent demand is time and money.

Than the Russian space program differs from the American?

Video the difference between our space program and American that American more money. But if we compare, for example, our “Federation” (the ship “Federation” which later became “Heads” and which is still unclear in which state — in the form of exhibition layouts plastic as it was 10 years ago, and remains), of course, think that the Mask is generally a great speaker. But we must not compare with the Musk. It is necessary to compare with the ship “Orion”. The Crew Dragon is a phenomenon exclusively a phenomenon of the Mask. That is, how it rapidly charges your team, how rapidly it is developing, and so on.

What we lack for space development?

The state cannot provide all the needs and all the desires of our space. When approved by the Federal space program for the 2015 — 25 years the Russian space Agency has requested more than three trillion rubles for ten years. But the Russian space Agency has received twice less — it was 1.4 trillion. This is less than the annual NASA budget for the 20th year.

Russia lost the lead in space exploration?

There are three countries with manned space flight. This is the big leagues. Steeper’t have anyone else. All the rest somewhere below. That’s when the Americans did not have a spacecraft, they could be anything: a super-heavy rocket Falcon, the Rover on Mars, New horizon at Pluto, the telescope “Hubble”… anyway, as long as they do not fly in space, they generally are not even close. But as soon as they reached this level, then it became clear that in fact the rest of the way ahead. And China even some part of the technology is already ahead of Russia. Today we are lagging behind only American in this event. All the rest as they were behind and still are. But if we think the extent of the race.

The interest in military space outweighs the interest in civil?

According to the military theme quite Roscosmos provides all needs: about half the money of the Russian space Agency from the state goes to military tasks. The problem of the Russian space Agency is not that something is not the can be in the military theme, and that the military doesn’t need more. He could create some sort of giant laser that would be fired anywhere in someone. But until we have reached the level of the eighties of Star wars and other things. And civil is of little interest to the Kremlin.

If you remember this epoch-making speech of Putin, when he showed a cartoon about the bombing of the missile contingent of Florida, I took the text of this address on the website kremlin.ru and just did a search on the words. And I got 42 times “missiles”, I think 26 times “military” once “astronaut” and “satellites”. The words “Moon”, “Mars” wasn’t there. That is, it was obvious that the missiles are interesting to him are not those that carry the astronauts, and not those that carry satellites.