On April 28, 2014 a panel discussion was held at Skolkovo on 'Interaction between the rocket and aerospace industry and commercial cosmonautics during the structural reforms to the sector', involving the General Director of the United Rocket and Space Corporation (ORKK), Igor Komarov, and Sergey Nedoroslev, a member of the ORKK's Advisory Council.
This opportunity to meet the directors of a corporation that was set up last year, with the aim of uniting the key production assets in the aerospace sector, attracted a huge amount of interest. As the Club's founder, Sergey Zhukov (an advisor to the Chairman of the Innovative Development Board), remarked in his opening address at the meeting, "issues related to establishing relations with the ORKK corporation undoubtedly concern all of us who are working in this sector, and for that reason we have with us today some of the key players in the Skolkovo Aerospace Community. Our key experts have come, as have the directors of the leading resident companies in the cluster, innovative companies and scientific research institutes," Sergey Zhukov stressed. One of the speakers in the panel discussion was Aleksey Belyakov, the Vice President and Executive Director of the Space Technology and Telecommunications Cluster. It was the first occasion on which he had addressed the members of the Club, and he gave a report on the cluster's annual results.
pictured, left to right: Igor Komarov, General Director of ORKK; Mikhail Kokorich, the founder of Dauria Aerospace; Aleksey Belyakov, Vice President of the Skolkovo Foundation and Executive Director of the Space Technology and Telecommunications Cluster; Sergey Zhukov, an advisor to the Chairman of the Innovative Development Board of the Skolkovo Foundation
The Space Technology and Telecommunications Cluster introduced a number of its resident companies at the meeting, whose technologies may be required by the corporation in the future, as the structure and strategy of ORKK's interaction with companies in the aerospace industry are formed.
At the moment we are pro-actively trying to establish demand for innovations on the side of the ORKK, and one of the ways in which we are doing this is by giving them an introduction to our resident companies working in the Earth remote sensing segments, and demonstrating some of the parts they make for spacecraft and other uses. In the long-term the process of cooperation with the ORKK is going to be systematized: we would like to establish a bilateral process of exchanging experience in the field of developing innovations, and also create a forum for effective collaboration between resident companies in the aerospace cluster and the ORKK," Aleksey Belyakov told Sk.ru.
Sergey Nedoroslev, who last June addressed members of the Club with a report on reforms to the sector, was the first of the distinguished guests to take the floor. He talked about the main aspects of the structural reforms. After emphasizing the active assistance that has been provided by experts from the Skolkovo Foundation in developing conceptual approaches for the reforms, he said that in the end the concept proposed by Kosmoprom won out. "95% of the experts working on the reforms agreed that the functions of the customer and the industry must be separated," Nedoroslev told the panel. This concept involves the ORKK being given the role of a management centre for the aerospace industry. For a period lasting between twelve and eighteen months, a process described by Sergey Nedoroslev as 'corporate work' will be carried out: i.e. the ORKK will be formed by means of contributions of shares in companies which manufacture rocket and aerospace products to its main capital. Roskosmos (which, according to Nedoroslev, has always maintained that the aerospace agency should be preserved) will keep its role as a customer.
Next to speak was Igor Komarov, the General Director of ORKK. Among other things, he talked about how the corporation's governing bodies are currently being formed, and the problems that the ORKK is encountering at this stage, and he set out his vision of the problems in the sector, presenting a type of SWOT analysis of its strong-points and weak points. Below are just some of the theories which describe the vision of the ORKK's directors - what should be done in order to revitalize it and give it some innovative impulse:
A pragmatic approach - "devote a lot of attention during the first stage to more pragmatic projects, of real commercial use";
Provide life-cycle quality assurance: when military quality control was lifted in the industry, we started losing out on quality assurance at every stage of the manufacturing cycle. And that in turns means that "the technological process must also concern the work we do with suppliers: we need to develop suppliers and improve their quality;
Medium-urgency anti-crisis measures are required at a host of companies, along with financial rehabilitation;
Workforce issues must be resolved as a matter of urgency. The shortage in staff numbers is particularly acute in the middle level.
In answer to a question from an employee of a Skolkovo company who was in the audience for the Club meeting, Igor Komarov said that in his opinion, it is often the case that the inventions we make end up without a practical application (they have "nowhere to land", as he put it).
"And if we are to solve tasks related to application, we must be more mobile and do some hard work in this area; we must be far more mobile;" due to our sluggishness "we are lagging behind in our technological ways," Komarov emphasized.
Aleksey Belyakov, who was next to speak, described a range of practical steps that can be taken in order to draw closer to the ORKK. They included reforms to methods of collaboration, such as:
This important and fascinating meeting of the Friends' Club for the Space Technology and Telecommunications Cluster concluded with presentations of several notable projects (including Dauria Aerospace - satellite technologies, Spectralaser, Sputniks, Azmerit and KB Dynamics), followed by a Q&A session.