Or years of economic recession, and the collapse of the ruble, much less crises and conflicts will make Russia give up its old dream of reaching the moon, even if it must be on the centenary of the historic flight of Neil Armstrong.
So far, economic difficulties have already forced to stretch again installments on the Russian plan to conquer the satellite from the launch of orbital devices and rovers, to a manned mission and finally a permanent base on the lunar surface.
Shortly before the outbreak of the global crisis in 2008, the Russian space agency Roscosmos expected to send a cosmonaut to the moon by 2030, but first the great global recession and then the collapse of oil, exacerbated by the conflict in Ukraine, have cooled ambitions space power.
In the next decade, the country intends to focus on building and improvement of automatic space systems: navigation and positioning Glonass (Russian analogue of GPS), communication satellites and sounding of the Earth, and scientific bases.
Some projects lunar program have passed into private hands, while others have been postponed until after 2025, said spokeswoman scientific division of Roscosmos developing the project, Olga Zharova, in an interview published this week by the newspaper Izvestia.