 "Putin sacks space agency chief, replaces Borisov, 68, with former deputy minister Bakanov, 39")
Russian President Vladimir Putin has brought in a generational shift the country’s space agency, Roscosmos, by firing the chief and replacing him with a man nearly half his age.
Putin has sacked Yury Borisov, 68, as Roscosmos chief and replaced him with Dmitry Bakanov, 39, a former deputy transportation minister. The Kremlin did not give any reason for the firing.
Borisov had met Putin in November to discuss plans for the Russian space agency, which was once the world leader in space exploration but lost out to the United States and China over time.
Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has pulled out of most of international collaborations. It has quit the Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana and has indicated it would quit the International Space Station (ISS) well before it is decommissioned in 2030. The withdrawal from international cooperation has been replaced by an increasing collaboration with North Korea and China — Russia is now essentially a junior partner of China in lunar programme. The US intelligence community has been reported as saying that Russia could deploy a nuclear weapon in space.
Borisov, who has been sacked, had taken charge of Roscosmos in 2022 from Dmitry Rogozin, who was seen as an ally of Putin. He was known of mocking the West on X and sparring with billionaire Elon Musk, the principal supporter of US President Donald Trump, who is known for his friendly ties with Putin. The new agency chief, Bakanov, has previously also run Russia’s Gonets communication satellite programme.
Even though Russian space programme has stagnated over the years, there are ambitious plans to restart it. In 2023, Russia’s Luna-25 mission was in a race with India’s Chandrayaan-3 to be the first to land on the south pole region of the Moon. Luna-25 eventually crashed and Chandrayaan-3 scripted history with the landing on the Moon on August 23, 2023.
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