August 14, 2007 (LPAC)--Speaking to journalists on Aug. 13, Academician Boris Chertok, the highest-level living space official going back to the Soviet space program of the 1950s, (born 1912), urged that Russia's economy must move away from being a raw materials producer, to create the technical capability to build bases on the Moon. He knows this from first-hand experience, having worked for twenty years with Sergei Korolev, the Soviet space program's "chief designer,'' who built most of the Soviet space program from scratch. "There are setbacks in related industries, for instance, in electronics,'' he said. "Our economy in its present state will not permit solving the ambitious tasks'' that have been outlined by space visionaries, he warned. "There is a need for cardinal changes in our economic policy.''

Chertok's remarks follow those made recently by another elder science statesman, Academician Erik Galimov, the director of the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, who is also frustrated by the lack of vision from the leadership of the Russian space agency, Roskosmos. A fight over space policy in Russia has been raging for months, and only recently have these science patriarchs publicly attacked the government policy. The fight was punctuated by the firing of Energia president, Nikolai Sevastyanov, a few weeks ago. Sevastyanov had proposed a multi-stage lunar exploration program, culminating in manned missions, and the mining of lunar helium-3 for fusion power plants on Earth. These plans had not been supported, or approved, by Roskosmos.

Chertok believes that it is "senseless to simply repeat what the Americans did at the end of the 1960s [Apollo program]. There must be a base on the Moon.'' Energia, for which Chertok consults, has proposed replacing the 1950s-era manned Soyuz capsule with the reusable Clipper spacecraft, and although Sevastyanov promotes his plan by stating it can be done quickly using today's technology, and that tourists should be brought along to help pay for the trip, Chertok's main point is that Russian R&D and high-technology industry must be up-graded, through a commitment by the government, for creating new capabilities, for new missions.