It was learned how many billion rubles it costs to train an astronaut for the Russian Federation 07:15

The long-term preparation of cosmonaut candidate Andrei Babkin, who was forced to resign from his flight duty in the cosmonaut corps, cost the Russian government tens of billions of rubles. Because of the film “The Challenge” Andrei Babkin never flew into space. This was told by astronautics expert Dmitry Strugovets to socialbites.ca.

Andrei Babkin has been preparing to fly into space since at least 2010. But as a source in the rocket and space industry told socialbites.ca, he was recently asked to sign an application for transfer from a flight position in the cosmonaut corps to the position of deputy commander of science. This means, according to the leadership of the Cosmonaut Training Center, that Babkin’s “expiration date” as a cosmonaut candidate has expired.

During the long years of preparation Babkin studied in Canada and the USA. Babkin also received a certificate in Germany to work with the European Space Agency payload and the Columbus module, and successfully completed a course of work with the JEM module and the HTV cargo ship of the Japanese space agency JAXA. According to Strugovets, these and other stages of preparing candidates for space flight cost the Russian government a large amount of money.

“Nobody can say the exact amount, of course this is classified information. It depends on what expenses we will take into account. On average, hundreds of millions of dollars or tens of billions of rubles are spent on training during the career of a cosmonaut,” Strugovets said.

The last chance for Babkin to fly into space was the ISS-66 expedition, but at the last moment he was replaced by Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko for the filming of the movie “Challenge”.

Read more about why Roscosmos did not allow Andrei Babkin’s career to develop in the investigation “socialbites.ca”.