Yury Borisov. Photo: kremlin.ru
Vladimir Putin has unexpectedly relieved Yury Borisov of his post as the head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, the Kremlin announced on Thursday.
Since his appointment by Putin in 2022, Borisov has overseen spiralling construction costs for a new National Space Centre in Moscow, as well as a significant drop off in the number of Russian rocket launches.
His replacement, former deputy Transport Minister Dmitry Bakanov, was appointed to head Roscosmos in a separate decree.
Borisov’s predecessor, Dmitry Rogozin, who is now a senator representing the annexed Zaporizhzhia region of southeastern Ukraine, welcomed the announcement of Bakanov’s appointment, calling him a “very intelligent expert and a good man” in a post on Telegram.
Most Roscosmos staff only heard about the managerial shakeup on Thursday morning, state-affiliated business news outlet RBC reported, with one source telling it that “everything happened overnight”.
Although Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that the Kremlin had “no qualms” with Borisov, his dismissal comes as the new National Space Centre in Moscow, which was originally due to open in 2022, is beset with construction delays and serious budget overspends. The prestige project, the centrepiece of which is a 288-metre triangular tower, is a joint venture between Roscosmos and the Moscow city government that will eventually house over 20,000 people working for some 18 different branches of the Russian space programme.
Despite significant budget increases in recent years, the Russian space programme is currently operating on a similar scale to that seen during the dawn of the space age in the early 1960s, according to figures published by the BBC, with Roscosmos carrying out just 17 rocket launches in 2024 — two fewer than in 2023, and four fewer than in 2022 — leaving Russia lagging well behind the United States, which launched 145 satellites, and China, which launched 68 satellites.
