Great first. In a difficult context, the Russian space agency Roscosmos will put on sale for the first time one of its Soyuz capsules. “The body of the descent vehicle n ° 738 of the Soyuz MS-08 mission” was put up for sale by Glavcosmos, a subsidiary responsible for promoting the space agency, in a press release published overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday. “The descent module will be an ideal work for any public or private exhibition with a space theme,” continued Glavcosmos, who does not specify how much the agency intends to raise money in this way.
“The question of the price of the shuttle is a trade secret,” Glavcosmos spokesman Yevgeny Kolomiev told AFP. This shuttle took Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemiev and NASA astronauts Drew Feustel and Richard Arnold to the International Space Station on March 21, 2018, taking off from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They had returned to Earth aboard the same shuttle on October 4. The Roscosmos agency did not wish to explain the reasons for this sale, a first for it.
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The space sector – which has announced many very ambitious projects – is underfunded, suffering both from recent budget cuts of 150 billion rubles (1.6 billion euros) and from international competition in the fields. manned flights and satellite launches. The director of Glavcosmos, Dmitri Loskoutov, quoted by the agency Ria Novosti, has not ruled out selling “other shuttles” in the future.
Russia has announced several major projects in recent months to revive its space industry. It will send a film crew to shoot a fictional film aboard the International Space Station in October, before putting Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano into orbit in December.
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The cost of the first project has not been revealed, nor the price that the wealthy space tourist will pay for two Soyuz tickets. Roscosmos has also shown its willingness to build its own space station by 2030 and to build a lunar station with China.
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