Sergei Krikalev leaves the post of executive director of Roscosmos
Nine executive directors of Roscosmos lost their portfolios of executive directors this week. The decision, according to a source in the space industry, was made by the supervisory board of the state corporation. About what the reshuffles may be associated with is in the MK material.
Sergey Krikalev
Rumors that Roscosmos should reduce its central apparatus by half have been circulating since last summer. The reason for this was an acute shortage of funds to pay the rank and file: designers, engineers, workers – all those who directly create space rockets, ships and satellites. By the way, workers in the space industry reported this to President Vladimir Putin at a meeting in October 2023.
For example, according to the general director of the Progress rocket and space center plant, Dmitry Baranov, whose words were quoted by the Samara online publication, the average salary at the enterprise is only 56 thousand rubles. Naturally, at “space” enterprises there are not enough millers, assemblers, and turners who are looking for big earnings in private companies.
Meanwhile, the number of the industry’s leadership has been growing until recently. If we look at the official documents of 2014-2015 on the creation of the state corporation, the central office was supposed to employ 450 people. As of last summer, there were about 600 of them, and the head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, according to our sources in the industry, announced a policy of cutting the overly inflated staff by half. By the way, the structure still has many subsidiaries, duplicating management organizations, the reduction of whose staff would definitely not affect the quality of the industry. On the contrary, the fabulous salaries of ordinary workers transferred from them would attract many truly valuable employees to the Group of Companies factories.
However, talk about reducing the “army of bosses” has been going on for a long time. Experts working at the enterprises noticed that such intentions previously, as a rule, ended in the formal transfer of a number of employees from the Roscosmos apparatus to subsidiaries without loss of salary.
“I would really like to hope that this time, having decided to cut executive directors, the corporation’s management actually decided to cut its staff,” one of the middle managers commented to us on the decision of the supervisory board. – After all, the position of “executive director” did not initially appear when the Group of Companies was created – there were only departments. It is unclear to whom and for whom the staff needed to be increased, because the same executive directors were the heads of the relevant departments. It is not yet clear whether they will now be simply called heads of departments with the same salary, or whether salaries will be cut.
If we proceed from the real situation, when Roscosmos lost most of the orders for launch services from Western countries, the reduction of management personnel necessary. Especially that army of economists who know little about space issues. Of course, this cannot be said about all executive directors. For example, according to a source in the industry, the executive director for advanced programs and science, Alexander Bloshenko, is waiting for the position of deputy head of the state corporation. But the fate of his colleague—by the way, the only cosmonaut in the leadership—Sergei Krikalev, who held the position of executive director for manned programs, is still unknown.
Recall that Krikalev is the plenipotentiary representative of the President of the Russian Federation for international cooperation in space.
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