President Putin held talks today with Mikhail Kovalchuk, the president of the Kurchatov Institute National Research Center on their perspective on upcoming science work. Kovalchuk informed him of their plans for developing new space engines. “Right now, all further exploration of space is connected with two things. The first is fundamentally new engines,” he explained. “We are flying into space today like Munchausen on a cannonball. Our RD-180 engine worked for 300 seconds, gave a kick—and we flew along ballistic trajectories that we cannot influence. But we need to patrol, to land on the Moon,” Kovalchuk said. “So, today we have prototype engines that provide a completely different thrust, completely different capabilities for deep space flight. That’s the first thing.”
He further said: “And now we have made a completely new nuclear energy—this battery. We have the Elena station, a factory-built battery, it gives up to a megawatt of electricity and up to 15 MW of heat. But in the Arctic, where there are no large consumers, where it is impossible to make either a grid structure or a large station, these local stations just solve the problem.” Nuclear batteries like this operate by the thermoelectric effect, to transform heat directly into electricity.
Kovalchuk also underlined the fact that since the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is firing hundreds of Russian scientists from the Large Hadron Collider, they are now free to be deployed on the programs initiated in Russia. As he noted, Kurchatov has some 30 institutes under its roof, working on a variety of projects. Kovalchuk said: “Plus fundamental physics, especially now, in connection with the fact that [collaboration with] CERN, all Western projects have ended, a huge number of people are returning here, the majority are people from the Kurchatov Institute. Therefore, the restart of fundamental research today is also a very important thing. And in this sense, we are actually concentrating a technological breakthrough.”
