The news that Dmitry Rogozin had been dismissed as director of Roscosmos, the state corporation that runs the Russian space program, was universally acclaimed in Western space policy circles. Rogozin’s history of making bellicose statements concerning Russia’s space partners has been a sore point even before his tenure at Roscosmos. However, his departure will not save the Russian space program from the systemic problems afflicting it.
That Rogozin was prone to undiplomatic statements became apparent in 2014 when, in the wake of economic sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Crimea, he threatened Western access to the International Space Station (ISS), which were hitching rides on Russia’s Soyuz rocket. Rogozin, then a deputy prime minister in charge of space and defense for the Russian Federation, suggested that NASA might need to access the ISS with a trampoline if the West did not back off on sanctions. Rogozin had personally been a target of those sanctions.
The threat turned out to be a hollow one. However, the trampoline remark came back to haunt Rogozin in 2020 when, finally, the NASA commercial crew program came to fruition and astronauts began flying to and from the ISS on board the SpaceX Crew Dragon, no longer relying on Russia for a ride. The Russian monopoly on access to the orbiting lab was broken. Russia lost a great deal of revenue it had enjoyed because of that monopoly, which had lasted since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.