President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday the first segment of Russia's new orbital station, which Moscow sees as the next logical development in space exploration after the International Space Station (ISS), should be put into operation by 2027.
The ISS is ageing and Tiangong is still quite small, so this is badly needed. Unfortunately in the current political climate it is unlikely that Western countries will want to join this project, so Russia might have issues funding the entire station.
Not to mention, they’re gonna have a hell of a time building anything like that without western electronic components, because I don’t see that faucet being turned back on anytime soon.
To be fair they'd only need -70 -80 tech, but I don't see that happening with that tech either because they have become too corrupt as a country, russians do no longer believe in the glory/superiority of Russia.
And obviously, a space station from the eighties wouldn't help much ofc.
That’s kind of the point. Russia already announced withdrawing from ISS and said they would build their own. The Soviets did build a couple small space stations back in the day, leading up to ISS so in theory they just need to dust off the plans and gather any spare parts. Even if that was it, I can’t see this happening
If I remember correctly, the Soviet space programme used to always build a backup. If the original worked, the backup would be maintained and then used on another mission, or used to train cosmonauts. So Mir's backup became the ISS's core module, and so on. So they should have some modules already built, and of course they have launch vehicles. The problem will be funding.
Anyway, NASA + ESA + Japan + Canada are planning another space station, but in lunar orbit.
It is most likely everything was scavenged and sold. There are videos of a current state of Buran, it's pretty much a skeleton of itself as everything valuable got stolen.