Putin inaugurates the new National Space Center in Moscow

Moscow.- The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, inaugurated today in Moscow the new National Space Center (NSC), which will house both the headquarters of the state agency Roscosmos and the offices of rocket manufacturing companies.

“In a word, everything must be done to ensure that Russia remains among the leaders in the exploration and study of the cosmos,” Putin said during his visit to the CEN, which he himself ordered to be built at the end of the last decade.

Putin stressed that the new center located in the west of the Russian capital should become a “real command station of Russian cosmonautics” and bring together in its facilities the work of technical engineers, as well as production, education and space science. In addition, the CEN will host the flight control center of the future Russian Orbital Station, announced Dmitri Bakanov, CEO of Roscosmos. The construction of the center, which will accommodate about 20,000 engineers, began in 2019 on the territory of the renowned Khrunichev Center and has involved an investment of 25,000 million rubles (about 300 million dollars). Precisely, according to the press, one of the reasons for the appointment of Bakánov last February to head Roscosmos is the modernization of the management of the space sector, burdened by corruption and technological lag compared to the U.S., China, Europe and other countries such as India.

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As of today, Russia is launching 8 times fewer rockets than the United States and four times fewer than China, returning to the levels of the 1960s, at the dawn of cosmonautics. The last major failure of the Russian space program was in August 2023 when the Luna-25 probe crashed into the lunar surface as it was about to become the first spacecraft to land on the South Pole of the Earth’s satellite.