21:15 12.04.2018

Our generation must change approach to managing space industry, otherwise we will lose it - Skorokhod

3 min read

The research associate of the Space Research Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the author of the educational portal about space and a member of the expert council of the LuckyBooks project Tetiana Skorokhod gave her opinion about the situation in the space sector of Ukraine.

"Our laboratory is preparing a state satellite project. It has been preparing for 10 years, because of the constant "swings" with funding. Programmers and a theoretical physicist resigned due to the delay with the financing. Those, who stayed are working on enthusiasm. This project, unfortunately, is impossible to implement without money," Skorokhod said. "Our generation must change the approach and the structure of management in the industry, how the financing is distributed. Then the doors will open to work with space for the new generation in our state. Otherwise we will lose specialists. They will leave to the countries that recognize their "brains." Only scientists from Ukraine will be known in the world, but not those who develop science at home."

However, Ukrainian enthusiasts do not leave a hope for a breakthrough in the industry. In the National Technical University of Ukraine Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (NTUU KPI) students have created CubSanta - the smallest artificial satellite of the Earth. It flew into space with 50 other satellites. There are fans of astronomy and astrophotography, who discover new space objects and receive awards for this.

"It seems to me that we are just now in the times when something completely new is beginning to be created in Ukraine. In a year or two we will hear about it," Skorokhod said.

The LuckyBooks project, which is a joint initiative of the "Ya Maibutnie Ukrainy" (I am the future of Ukraine) charity foundation and the IT company Lucky Labs, decided to brief students on the starry sky by organizing an excursion to the observatory on the Day of Cosmonautics to support the interest of modern youth in space.

Knowledge of the Astronomical Observatory of Kyiv University and the museum under the Observatory began with an important point. After all, all those present simply stood on the Kyiv meridian, which passes through the building of the observatory. In the museum schoolchildren asked a lot of questions: how to find stars that cannot be seen even through the best telescopes, whether the entire world emerged from one explosion, and if we all consist of stellar particles. But the main event was the contemplation of stars through a huge telescope.

"The admiration and joy with which a person looks at the stars will, probably, never fade. The more stars we can call by name, the more constellations we can discern, the closer and closer the sky becomes for us. After a student stood on the Kyiv meridian could he or she forget about it? I think that deep and sincere interest in the subject arises from romance, poetry and fairy tales," Kateryna Vasylenko, a natural science teacher at the alternative Kiterra school, who was taking a tour in the observatory with the children, said.

The space topic has for many years remained one of the most interesting for science fiction writers and scientists. The stars are interesting for adults and children. In the near future, teenagers from the eastern regions of Ukraine will also be able to "touch the stars", having received books about the space and the universe written by one of the most brilliant modern scientists of our age, Stephen Hawking, from the LuckyBooks project.

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