It is not often that “incredible people… materialise”, Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked in the latest move of what appears to be a Kremlin bid to flatter SpaceX pioneer Elon Musk, possibly as part of a bid to get into U.S. President Donald Trump’s good graces.
Russian President Vladimir Putin engaged in conversation about the apparently organic manifestation of men of destiny at certain points in history with a group of university students on Wednesday. Speaking of space exploration, he compared South African-American billionaire Elon Musk to the creator of the Russian space programme and hero of the Soviet Union Sergei Korolev.
Putin told the students: “You know, there’s a man – he lives in the States – Musk, who, one might say, raves about Mars. It is not often that such people, charged with a certain idea, appear in the human population. If even it seems incredible to me today, after a while such ideas often materialize.”
Linking Musk’s drive to go to Mars with the past achievements of Soviet science, in their day, the Russian leader continued: “Just like in their time the ideas of Korolev, our other pioneers, got to materialize. They seemed incredible – some of the plans they made. But they all materialized”.
KOROLYOV, RUSSIA: A girl looks at the monument to the founder of Soviet space industry Sergei Korolev and the copy of “Vostok” rocket which was used for Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961, in Russian Rocket-Space Energiya Corportion (RKK Energiya) headquarters in the town of Korolyov, near Moscow, 06 July 2001. (ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)
Per Russian state media, he continued to remark: “A mission to Mars would be very hard. It now seems very difficult to implement. If you take an interest in this, you probably know”.
Sergei Korolev was a Soviet rocket engineer who was instrumental in creating the world’s first ICBM, putting the first artificial satellite Sputnik into space, and the first human being into space. He was one of many Soviet scientists who was arrested and sent to a concentration camp during the Stalin terror purges and he died relatively young, at the height of the space race in which he was a key component, at least in part due to health damage incurred during his time in a Siberia gulag.
The existence of Korolev and his impact on the Soviet space programme was not revealed to the Russian public until after he died.
Responding to Putin’s comments and on a Mars mission in general, chairman of the Russian Direct Investment Fund — the Kremlin’s sovereign wealth fund — Kirill Dmitriev mused “This is getting more real”. Dmitriev visited Washington D.C. earlier this month for talks with Trump administration figures for peace talks. The U.S. temporarily suspended the sanctions against him and the wealth fund to allow him to visit America in that diplomatic role.
Putin’s remarks are not the first time the Russian Federation has appeared to try and reach out to Mr Musk.
Dmitriev, who is Harvard and Stanford-educated and who worked at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey before returning to Moscow to serve President Putin in 2011 proposed Russian-U.S. cooperation in reaching Mars last month. He said there would “certainly” be talks with Musk on space cooperation “in the near future”, and said: “we believe that Musk is a unique leader who is focused on humanity moving forward together. And his focus is on the fact that we must move forward creatively – of course, we see this, and he is one of the greatest leaders of our time.”
Calling for technology to “serve for the benefit of humanity, not for its destruction” — of course Russia is one of the world’s main producers of missiles for military purposes, so such coments may be taken with a pinch of salt — Dmitriev suggested 2029 as a date for a U.S.-Russia mission to Mars.
Elon Musk himself has spoken of Mars Transfer Windows — the periods where Earth and Mars are at their closest, which occur every few years. He has said he wants to send an uncrewed test mission in the 2026 window and, if that is successful, manned missions in the 2029 or 2031 windows.
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