Story By: Feza Uzay, Sub-Editor: Marija Stojkoska, Agency: Newsflash
Disgruntled Russian cosmonauts have filed complaints against excessive bureaucracy, a decline in the quality of training, and low salaries.
Members of the cosmonaut corps filed a complaint about their working conditions at the Cosmonaut Training Centre (CPK) and asked the head of the state corporation Dmitry Rogozin to put their detachment under direct supervision of Roscosmos instead of their corrupted managers, according to local media.
Roscosmos, also known as the Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities, is a Russian corporation responsible for space flights, cosmonautics programmes, and aerospace research.
Roscosmos is now trying to decide how to support the unhappy cosmonauts, while Rogozin has already informed President Putin about their request.
The cosmonauts have reportedly been expressing their frustrations at low salaries, promised but unfinished housing for families, bureaucracy, low level of specialist training, and being disrespected.
Insufficient training arose as a problem at the end of November last year when a team of Russian cosmonauts was unable to fulfil their main task in outer space, replace the old panel of the thermal control system in the ISS’s Zarya module with a new one, according to the news site Fishki.
The Fishki reports said another problem is that CPK managers have been writing out huge bonuses for themselves, literally profiting from the cosmonauts’ dangerous work.
One of the cosmonauts said: “They are managers who must simply provide us with conditions for training, but it turns out that they see us as means for self-enrichment. Why do the managers give themselves salaries many times higher than ours?”
It was not stated whether the cosmonauts are still at work for the time being.
Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly instructed Rogozin to sort out the problem quickly.
Details about possible action steps Rogozin might be taking to solve this have not been released.
In December, Roscosmos announced that it has begun filming a documentary on the life of the astronauts locked in the International Space Station, with the help of virtual reality technologies.
In this documentary, aiming to fascinate and attract more young people to be interested in space science, crew members Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov will be showing how life works in the Russian module of the ISS.
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