Umirzak Sultangazin, the head of the Kazakh Institute for Space Research, complained bitterly in an interview he granted last year to the Russian-language "Karavan":
"Our own satellite is an dire need. So far, we are using data "received" from US and Russian satellites. Some information we use is free, but we have to pay for certain others … We have high-class specialists but they are leaving the institute for commercial structures because they are offered several times bigger salaries. I have many times raised this question and said: Look, Russia pays us not a small amount to lease Baykonur [some 115m dollars a year], why should we not spend part of this money on space research? We could have developed the space sector and become a real space power."
Kazakhstan has its own earth profiling program administered by its own cosmonauts. It runs biological and physical experiments in orbit. The "tokhtar" is a potato developed in space and named after Kazakhstan's first astronaut, the eponymous Tokhtar Aubakirov.
Almost all the former satellites of the USSR have established their own space programs after they broke away, vowing never again to be dependent on foreign good will. Romania founded ROSA, the Romanian Space Agency in 1991. Hungary created the Hungarian Space Office.
The Baltic states - to the vocal dismay of many of their citizens - work closely with NATO on military applications of satellites within the framework of BALTNET (the Baltic air space control project). Poland (1994), Hungary (1991), Romania (1992) and the Czech Republic have been cooperating with ESA on a variety of space-related commercial and civil projects.
Ukraine hedges its bets. It signed with Brazil a space industry bilateral accord in January. A month later it signed five bilateral agreements regarding the space industry with Russia.
Many Western academic institutions, NGO's, and commercial interests created frameworks for collaboration with space scientists from Central Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, CIS, and NIS. The University of Maryland pioneered this trend with its East-West Space Science Center, formed in 1990.
The space industry - and particularly the emerging field of launch technologies - represents one of the few areas in which the former communist countries may retain a competitive edge and a relative advantage. The West would do well to encourage the commercialization of this knowledge.
The alternative is proliferation of missile technologies and military applications of technology transferred within collaborative efforts on civilian projects with Western partners. The West can save itself a lot of money and heartache by being generous early on.
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