No longer a giant in space.
The week's news at a glance.
Russia
Viktor Myasnikov
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
The Russian space program is all but dead, said Viktor Myasnikov in Moscow’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta. This country launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, and it sent Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin into space as the first human to orbit the Earth. But those glory days are over. More than half of Russia’s satellites are lifeless hulks. At a recent session of the upper house of parliament, the military informed “flabbergasted senators” that Russia now relies on foreign space technology for even the most basic tasks. We use Canadian weather satellites to track storms across our territory and American global positioning satellites to route and land our planes. Most appalling, our “missile attack early warning systems” are “hopelessly outdated.” So much for the nuclear deterrent. Yet the government’s solution is “to pour $2 billion into a lunar expedition program,” which may or may not ever land a spacecraft on the moon. The Russian people love the idea of going to the moon, so “to hell with real national interests.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
How clean-air efforts may have exacerbated global warming
Under the Radar Air pollution artificially cooled the Earth, ‘masking’ extent of temperature increase
-
September 14 editorial cartoons
Cartoons Sunday’s political cartoons include RFK Jr on the hook, the destruction of discourse, and more
-
Air strikes in the Caribbean: Trump’s murky narco-war
Talking Point Drug cartels ‘don’t follow Marquess of Queensberry Rules’, but US military air strikes on speedboats rely on strained interpretation of ‘invasion’