The Russia-led $30-mln international project is aimed at building and placing into orbit an instrument of similar design to NASA’s famous Hubble Space Telescope. Germany and Spain are also involved in the project, producing spectrographs for the telescope.
"The last proposal… has not yet been approved, but the letter [from Roscosmos] has already arrived. It envisions the reduction of the signed contract by three times in 2019, and by 10 times in 2020. The saddest thing is that in 2021 the project will also receive almost zero financing," Sachkov, who is a deputy scientific manager of the project, said.
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“For such a project, the drop in funding by 10 times means, in essence, a complete stop of work,” Sachkov stressed.
Roscosmos has so far refrained from commenting on the issue. However, a source in the Russian space industry told Sputnik that "all financial parameters of scientific programs had been agreed with the customer."
The Spektr-UV project, also known as World Space Observatory-Ultraviolet, or WSO-UV, is meant to facilitate observations in the ultraviolet spectrum, which cannot be conducted by telescopes based on Earth.