Stargazing songs make Moscow hit parade
Space agency director general releases album of patriotic songs about cosmos
Austerity is gripping the Russian space agency Roscosmos, with management facing salary hits and staff layoffs predicted.
But Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin is trying to craft a more upbeat tune — literally.
Rogozin, a longtime songwriter who mixes Venus and Vegas, has lent his name to an album's worth of patriotic space-themed songs on the agency's official website.
The album has a version of Rogozin's I Fly Above Russia, with an accordion solo.
“We must work in order to defend/the gift of our forefathers,” go the lyrics. “And at night, intoxicated or dry/We dream of Russia.”
Rogozin also wrote the power ballad We Tear the Sky to Shreds and a tune with all the stagy soar of a Eurovision song contest entry, Above the Earth Flies a Ship.
“Above the Earth flies a ship,” begins one chorus. “In the cosmos of space/Like an ancient airship/ Friend of wind and wandering/ Snug in a star blanket.”
There's also a rendition of the 1980s' The Grass at Home, a song about cosmonauts longing for familiar lands, which became the official Roscosmos anthem in 2009.
In terms of national mythmaking, Russian achievements in space are outmatched only by the victory over the Nazis.
Celebrating the nation's accomplishments beyond Earth's boundaries is a fail-safe way to invoke popular support even during troubling times.
President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin has drawn on space race symbolism more than once last year to project an image of strength amid the pandemic.
Naming Russia's coronavirus vaccine Sputnik V, in honour of the iconic Soviet satellite program, was meant to surround the country's coronavirus response with an aura of innovation and triumph.
Rogozin is not the first high-ranking Russian official to venture into performance. Vladislav Surkov, who was one of the architects of the Putin era before being ousted, released a poem in September on the “natural high” of breathing (“Who needs cocaine?”).
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has also penned a few pop hits, ranging from breakup songs to ballads about Syria.
Even Putin has been known to play the piano while waiting to receive foreign dignitaries.
Rogozin has even used the Roscosmos trademark “Let's go!” — the famous words Yuri Gagarin spoke in 1961 before becoming the first human to orbit the Earth — for upcoming collections of perfume, alcohol and clothing.
When the U.S. space shuttle program was retired in 2011, delegating all future International Space Station launches to the Roscosmos Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, it was a symbolic victory that reasserted Russian dominance over the cosmos.
In May, Elon Musk's Crew Dragon Demo-2 successfully transported American astronauts to the station. It was seen by Roscosmos as a challenge in one of the last areas where the Kremlin could boast technological authority.
Some Russian internet pranksters quickly made a deepfake music video of Musk singing The Grass at Home, one of the 12 songs released on the Roscosmos site.
Meanwhile, Russian citizens are encouraged to contact Roscosmos with ideas for more space songs.