- Russia confirmed its absolute leadership for space launches in the past year, Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), said at the traditional meeting of the Club of the Leading Russian Media Editors-in-Chief in Itar-Tass on Monday.

He said Russia made 31 launches of various booster rockets last year (one of them failed), which made up 41 percent of the launches in the world. “We are called ‘space cabbies’ and we are proud of that”, the Roscosmos chief said. “This is quite an achievement to win in tough competition” in the world today, “accounting for 41 percent of the launches,” he said.

Russia made 18 launches under the state programs in 2010 (as compared with 15 each by the US and China), including nine launches in the framework of the international space station (ISS) program (four manned and five cargo launches), which, Perminov said, “was enough for effective functioning of the station.”

He pointed out that from this year Russia will be the only country capable of regularly putting cargos on orbit (the flights of US shuttles to the ISS stop from the middle of this year).

“This is a huge responsibility, and this is also very dangerous,” Perminov holds, since alongside launchings of old analogs of the Soyuz and Progress ships new elements are tried out, the new digital control system and other systems are worked out, to be installed on ships of the new generation. “A well-tested digital system will work in an automatic regime on board a future manned ship,” he said.

At the same time the Roscosmos head admitted that the past year “was far from the best year because of the GLONASS system in view of a failed launching of a Proton booster rocket on December 5, as a result of which three “Glonass-M” spacecraft were lost. Because of that accident, the state sustained the damage amounting to 2.5 billion rubles.