The risk of war in the world “exists and increases,” but “must be more to the misunderstanding of the danger on the part of the young generations that the potential weapons, or to the stagnation of morals”, says Yuri Baturin, cosmonaut, physical, specialist in dynamics and direction of flight, a jurist and journalist. “That’s why we should not concentrate just as before in reducing the armament”, warns the expert, adviser to president Mikhail Gorbachev during the death throes of the USSR and president Boris Yeltsin in the first steps of the new Russia.
Russia will not face with the West in the space, because it “lacks the force [needed] for a war that not only requires missiles and weapons, but also an economic potential,” says Baturin, according to which “in the West, the level of understanding of the danger is greater” than in your country. As deterrence to act in the many people linked with the power structures in Russia today who have capital or family in the West. “It would be like starting the war against their own children.” “A space warfare would not be a contest between gadgets cosmic, as you can imagine in Hollywood, but that would destroy the terrestrial infrastructure of the adversaries, and if, as has been predicted by some, occurs in the middle of this century, they would fight those who are in the first row and Russia would not be among them” sentence.
“Send someone to give back to Mars and back would mean your certain death”
Born in 1949, Baturin has just published a book on the profession of a cosmonaut, which includes daily details of their two stays in orbit, first in the SoyuzTM-28 in 1998 and then in the SoyuzTm-32 in 2001, in addition to scientific observations, historical, and philosophical. The king of the infinite, the title of his work, comes from Shakespeare and it symbolizes “the feeling of sailing in a walnut shell in a space immensely more powerful than the human being to become aware of the own insignificance and stupidity of pose space exploration as a conquest.” “One does not conquer what he can annihilate. You have to learn to think in another way”, he says.
the Son of a secretísimo soviet spy, resident in Istanbul during the Second World War, Baturin was banned “indefinitely” from travelling abroad when he was an engineer in the space industry soviet in the seventies. But in 1988, the doors of the world opened for him with the perestroika. Baturin helped Gorbachev in trying to reform the State and on December 1991, when it tore down the flag of the USSR, organized a program of analysis on television. Yeltsin saw it and hired him and his entire team. And so it came to the Kremlin, a team of intellectuals to which it was a normal conversation with journalists at the center of power.
Baturi, in his time astronaut. A. MAZOV
“unlike nuclear weapons, the development of space weapons is to damage the infrastructure on the land without destroying it, so that it can be used later by the victor and that they should work on it. They are not lethal weapons, though there will be victims if they are used,” he says. “International law does not regulate today the location of lasers powerful in the space. With the radiation of powerful lasers it is possible for example to leave Moscow or another city without power. For this you have to locate weapons quite powerful in the space, and this will happen”, he says. In the united STATES, Russia, China and Japan are working to develop these lasers, explains.
In 2008, Russia and China submitted to the UN a joint project of agreement to prevent the installation of weapons in space, the use of force or the threat of force against space facilities. “Since you’re studying it,” he says with irony. “The emergence of the atomic bomb altered the perception of danger for the humanity and the understanding that all die [if used] has been maintained for a long time.” But, he warns, “the leadership of the united States now comes people for whom the atomic bomb is Supertotobet part of the world in which they passed their entire lives. The habit [of living together with atomic weapons] causes it to underestimate the danger.”
The sanctions imposed on Russia by the US does not affect time to cosmonáutica. Astronauts north american and NASA continue to work with the russians. The contract of NASA with Roscosmos, the government agency in russia responsible for the space program, to carry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) matures in march 2019. “As the americans rely on Russia to carry its astronauts to the ISS, everything necessary for the flights and the continuity of the work of the station is not affected by the sanctions. Now we just have to wait it out to make a ship piloted. The americans think that they will use their own ships, if they are ready, and that they will not sign agreements with us.”
Baturin believes that in comparison with the USSR, Russia lacks a “real space program”
The ISS, which turned 20 years old in November, will prolong your life until 2024. “The americans now need the station for train to show the new manned spacecraft, but in the future the ISS is not a priority for them, while for us it is in fact the only task,” says Baturin.
The expert doubts the emergence of a space station Russian when the ISS stop working. “You are not yet finished modules russians that should have been put into operation some years ago on the ISS, and now they say that they will make to our station in Russian. Knowing how things are here, I’m not totally sure that will our station when you stop working the ISS”.
“The modules have not been built, despite have the plans, the money and the people necessary to do this, because it works in a new economic mechanism that allows to increase substantially the personal benefit at the expense of the decrease of the effectiveness in the achievement of the state purposes”, he says with diplomacy.
The major corporations in the space industry russia can create its own subsidiaries and these work to their managers. These have “their own interests and they fund these subsidiaries with State money that comes to the company main”. “The State is so closely linked to the private enterprises, which, by law, can not inspect it thoroughly and that, in that way, they rob without the control organs may be able to discover the crime. Laws have been enacted precisely to allow to be carried with impunity to the money of the State”.
For the trip manned Mars wait. “Boris Chertok [one of the founders of the cosmonáutica soviet] predicted in 2010 that the first successful flight will be in 2101,” he says. “Depending on the approach between lto earth and Mars, it takes between 2.5 and 3 years to go and come back. Today to send a cosmonaut to travel to Mars and back would be his sure death, because it has not been resolved, the defence against the radiation. Valeri Poliakov, with a record of 437 days in space, is of the opinion that Mars should fly only cosmonauts retirees, by their experience, and to have no need of reproductive function”. Baturin is prepared, but “the young people are queuing up to go and I will have to wait 15 years until the doctors decide to experiment with a body old.”
In his opinion, “the Cold War drove the development of the cosmonáutica more international cooperation”. The cosmonáutica, he said, was “the result of the collateral of the weapon development and suffered when the Cold War ended and there was no money to develop weapons. Lacked the impulse.”
Perhaps it was not such an impulse the search for other worlds? Maybe yes for the European Space Agency, who arrived later at the space club, but “in the USSR and USA space exploration was formed as a horse bridled and flourished thanks to the Cold War,” he says. The europeans approach the space from a different perspective: “The tasks today are more complicated and require international cooperation”.
Writes Baturin in comparison with the USSR, Russia lacks a “real space program” and the documents in which plasma its plans “are inconcretos”, do not have a systematic approach or a total vision, nor an engineering approach and is limited to formulating vaguely, their primary purpose is “to ensure their presence in the space.”
The performance of Russia in the space is based on “the economic exploitation of the rockets that it has, and make a profit, here and now, without thinking of the future. In the USSR“, posed tasks clear” and the process was “rational”. Now,this process doesn’t happen in a normal sequence. They began to build the cosmódromo Vostochni (in the Russian far east, assuming that it would be the launch site of the rocket Soyuz. It will be a long time before the cosmonauts fly to space from there. At the management level there is no engineers, only managers, lawyers or economists, who delegate the task of drafting the programme documents to lower levels, where each one is concerned of your parcelita and they all want their companies to receive money and to continue to exist”.
The space is financed not less than before in Russia but, if it suffers from the action of the “machine cut” (as it is designated popularly the theft of official resources assigned to an end). “How much has been stolen from the cosmodromo Vostochni, where the platform launches is practically a building site,” he says. In February, for having caused losses of billions of rubles to the State, responsible for the construction of Vostochni were sentenced to terms of up to 12 years in prison. Recently, Alexei Kudrin, the head of the chamber of accounting of Russia, denounced “transgressions ” financial record” on Roscosmos in 2017. In June, Kudrin the assessed 760.000 million rubles (about 1000 million euros to the change).
