With the sudden collapse of the USSR in August 1991, even its flagship was at risk of being dismantled: the military-industrial complex with 600,000 workers, engineers, and scientists. The $4 billion budget in 1989 collapsed to $0.7 billion in 1994, and thousands of prestigious technicians emigrated to the West. Worse still, Oleg Baklanov, head of the space industry, had the brilliant idea of joining the group that carried out the attempted coup in 1991. The obvious consequence was a certain government distrust of the space industry. But the sector did not disappear; on the contrary, it recovered, and today Russia remains one of only three nations that can send people into space.
