GLONASS Major Part of Russian Plans to be a High-Tech Leader

R ussian First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, wants to spend at least $60 billion over the next 10 years to make Russia a global high-tech titan, according to Bloomberg News. LyubovPronina has posted a wide-ranging article outlining the country's goals for competing globally in high-tech. Among the highlights:

Russia is spending 9.9 billion rubles [about $405 million USD] in 2007 to turn its Global Navigation Satellite System, Glonass, into a rival of the U.S. Global Positioning System, or GPS. Russia plans to have full global coverage with 24 satellites in orbit by 2010.

By 2015, says Yuriy Urlichich, head of the Russian Research Institute of Space Instrument Building, Glonass will be selling tens of billions of dollars of services annually to operators of mobile communications devices around the world.

For Putin and Ivanov, space remains a high priority. Anatoly Perminov, head of the Federal Space Agency, told the RIA Novosti news agency it spent 24.4 billion rubles ($1 billion) in 2007 on the International Space Station and other projects. The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration spent $16.2 billion.

Among the Russian government's other tech plans are:

• To capture 10 percent of the global market for information technology and office equipment by 2020.
• To put a man on the moon by 2025
• To put a man on Mars after 2035.
• To become the No. 3 maker of commercial airplanes.

To accomplish their lofty goals, Russia is abandoning the free-market if favor of Soviet-style central planning, combining smaller companies into single government- controlled conglomerates. Boris Chertok, who worked on the first Sputnik satellite told Bloomberg, "We need to restore what we have lost over 15 years of destructive reforms. The market economy is incapable of fulfilling such large national programs as flight to the moon."

It remains to be seen how well large, government-controlled companies can compete in a high-tech field where victory generally goes to the quick and nimble.

In addition to bureaucratic hurdles, there are at two other obstacles to Russian plans of becoming a high-tech power.

1. Many of the country's smartest math and science students leave for better paying jobs elsewhere, while many young people favor business degrees, ignoring science and math altogether.
   
2. The country is a technological backwater. A recent ranking by Economist Intelligence Unit put Russia 48th, behind India and the Philippines, in ability to support a competitive IT environment.

See also: Report: GLONASS Could Be Operating By 2009
GLONASS to Top U.S.'s GPS, Putin Says

Photo courtesy of Masta Bord.

Compromise to Allow Galileo to go Forward

Members of the European Union (EU) have reached a compromise that will allow funding of the Galileo satellite project The Register reported:

...States voted to back a €2.4bn funding deal, drawing cash from unused farming subsidies, and restructuring research and industrial spending for the year.

This means the European rival to the US military's GPS system can go ahead, but no extra public funds will be written into the EU's budget to pay for it.

The original plan was to have the scheme be funded at least partly by the private sector, but contractors walked away (probably shaking their heads) saying they couldn't make the numbers stack.

The idea of using taxpayers' cash to fill the gap in funding was particularly abhorrent to Germany, which was worried about creating a precedent of using up excess funds instead of passing them back to the member states. The UK is said to have had similar concerns, but unlike Germany, eventually voted in favour of the plan.

German officials had previously expressed concerns that German contractors would be excluded from contracts to build the system. According to reports, the project will be split into six pieces, with each member state able to be the prime contractor on a maximum of two sections, a process reportedly acceptable to Berlin.

Not everyone in Europe is happy with the plan. In an editorial, The Times called the Galileo system "An overpriced piece of pie in the sky" saying the EU is paying too much for an overcomplicated system that doesn’t yet work.

See also: Germany Says No to Galileo Funding
Galileo's Future Uncertain
Galileo to be Grounded?