Lesley Cowling
A plan for Russia to train South Africans as astronauts – announced 14 months ago amid much fanfare – has run into financial difficulties, with both countries reluctant to foot the bill.
On a visit to South Africa at the end of 1995, Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets told Deputy President Thabo Mbeki that Russia was willing to send a group of young South Africans to Moscow to train in Russia’s space programme. Mbeki accepted the offer and announced it at a diplomatic function in Pretoria.
However, once representatives of the two countries met to discuss the plan, the issue of the price tag arose. “It’s a costly operation,” said Frank Chikane, director general of the deputy president’s office, “and we made it clear we didn’t have the resources.”
However, Chikane says negotiations around the plan are ongoing, and they are looking for ways to resolve the financial difficulty. “Diplomatic things move slowly,” he said.
Russian press attache Dimitri Erutin confirmed that the offer had been made and accepted and that the difficulty now was one of finances. “The plan is under consideration by both sides now,” he said.
Although no one is saying so, it seems “the issue of finances arose” because the Russians actually wanted to be paid for the training programme and Soskovets’s offer came with a hidden price tag.
The Russian space programme is having financial difficulties itself, and the crash of its Mars space probe last year was a devastating blow. Space agencies around the world can no longer rely on government funding for their programmes, but raise money by getting countries and companies to pay them for launching satellites or carrying experiments on board their space craft.
However, the astronaut plan is not South Africa’s only way into space: the country is also involved in other aspects of space technology, especially satellites. Nasa will launch a South African microsatellite into space this year, at no cost, in exchange for data from the microsatellite.