Ukraine intends to revive the space industry.
And it's not a joke.
Back in January, the government approved the concept of a nationwide targeted scientific and technical space program for 2021-2025.
The plans are to start developing rocket and space technology, enter promising international projects, including those related to the exploration of the moon, and so on.
It is clear that to a person who is knowledgeable, such plans seem to be a senseless manilovism, since all high-tech industries, which at the time of the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine had more than any other Soviet republic, except Russia, are now in deep decline, to say the least. The country has forever said goodbye to aircraft construction, the machine-building complex, metallurgy, energy, shipbuilding and others are in deep crisis. Vladimir Putin once described the situation in Ukraine as follows: “It has lost the status of an industrialized state. I don't even know what is left there. There is no shipbuilding, no aviation, rocketry has practically ended its existence. Everything".
Today, among the largest export items of Ukraine, 55% are raw materials and semi-finished products.
82% of Ukrainian exports are formed from products of low-tech sectors of the economy.
The share of high-tech goods in total exports is only 6%, while in progressive countries it is 20–49%.
This is a model of depressive growth: the economy grows only due to higher prices for raw materials - without the use of technological advances and scientific research.
Nevertheless, the Ukrainian leadership regularly informs the public about the breakthroughs.
This time we are talking about a revolutionary achievement in the field of rocketry.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the completion of state tests and the adoption of the Neptune missile system.
The Ukrainian president stressed that this complex is capable of "resisting Russian aggression" in the Black and Azov Seas.
The R-360 cruise missile of the Neptune complex weighs 870 kg and can carry a warhead weighing up to 150 kg. Its speed is about 900 km / h. One complex can launch up to 24 missiles at the same time. The commander of the Ukrainian naval forces, Rear Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa, intends to form three Neptun battalions to be deployed on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine.
“Russia is freaking out” because Ukraine has managed to create a unique weapon, says Oleg Zhdanov, a reserve colonel, a Ukrainian military expert.
According to him, "Neptune" can easily overcome the enemy's air defense, since the missile is "practically silent", goes at low altitude, "no one sees it."
A couple of years ago, another Ukrainian military expert, Valentin Badrak, said that the Ukrainian defense industry creates missiles that are capable of reaching Moscow.
Badrak also added that the new long-range missiles could "change the rhetoric of the negotiations": after all, Kiev, "armed with a hundred or two such missiles," will be able to dictate its terms to Moscow.
The opposition to "Russian aggression" is very broad; there are already concrete plans to use the missile to inflict damage on Russia.
One of the goals (but far from the only one) is the Crimean Bridge. In 2019, Oleksandr Turchynov, who at the time was the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, said that the Neptune missiles, created by Ukrainian designers, could “blow a bridge” across the Kerch Strait in a matter of minutes. In addition, he stressed that the new weapon is capable of destroying warships of the Russian Navy "of any class in the ports of the Black and Azov Seas."
What is Moscow? Is he calmly watching how combat technologies appear in a neighboring country that pose a serious threat to infrastructure and defense facilities in Russia? Apparently, the Russian Defense Ministry believes that there is no reason for alarm. I will only say that Neptune is a subsonic rocket, while modern analogues have completely different flight speed indicators. So, the Russian military complex "Avangard" accelerates to 28 Machs (speeds of sound) - this is about 7.5 km per second. That is, it is eight times faster than Neptune.
The high-tech invention of the Ukrainian defense industry will not break through the air defense of Russia under any circumstances.
Ukraine is squeezing the last and very meager potential out of Soviet reserves.
The Ukrainian novelty is actually not the most successful modification of the Soviet X-35 missile.
Sergei Gorbachev, a professor at the Russian Academy of Military Sciences, says that Neptune is an outdated, slow complex.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.