Rob Coppinger: April 2007 Archives

This week in the world financial centre that is New York a meeting of investors and space technology development companies quietly made the commercial exploitation of space a little bit more realistic.
While Virgin Galactic is a public relations cheer leader there is a range of companies pushing ahead with their own ideas with Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) close behind Virgin in terms of publicity.
Rocketplane Kistler (Rpk), a company with the same goals as both SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, is developing its Kistler(K)-1 rocket and the XP suborbital spaceplane. It attended this event to present itself to investors with president Randy Brinkley doing the meet and greet.
The promise RpK, SpaceX, Virgin and their cohorts hold out is the realisation of all of us being able to go where only a few highly trained professionals have gone before. Watching the Apollo astronauts go to the Moon people everywhere could imagine that the year 2001 would be a universe of space hotels and lunar excursions.

One regret that Cold War watchers had with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the end of Kremlinology, the "science" that attempted to ascertain Soviet intentions from the few photographed appearences and statements of the then ruling Communist Party's leadership.
The era of Yeltsin and the rather chaotic form of democracy that embraced Russia in those final years of the twentieth century seemed to end forever the characteristics of Russian society that led to the western perception of it being "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" - to quote UK primeminister Sir Winston Churchill.
But the rise of Vladimir Putin and the return of the country's security-military complex, that largely ran the Soviet Union, as the central organising power within Russian society has returned many loved emblems of "the old times", for example the year 2000 return of the National Anthem of the Soviet Union, originally called the Anthem of the Bolshevik Party, as Russia's official national song.
One other emblem is the mysterious rise and fall of individuals and factions within the higher echelons of Russian society, whether they be involved business or politics.
The Russian space industry, like the nation's oil companies, falls under both, having increasingly heavy government interest in its fortunes while operating in a commercial market.
And its looking very likely that the latest victim of this will be Nikolai Nikolaevich Sevastianov, president and designer general of the Moscow area based S. P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia.