ZHELEZNOGORSK, August 05. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia needs to boost domestic production of military-purpose and communication spacecraft with the main focus on the import substitution strategy, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Tuesday.

“Following a series of misfortunes, connected with unsuccessful launches of spacecraft, we faced the task of the [space] industry reorganization,” Rogozin said upon his visit to Russia’s largest Reshetnev Information Satellite Systems (RISS) enterprise based in Krasnoyarsk.

This May Russia’s Proton-M rocket with an Express-AM4R telecommunications satellite went down shortly after blasting off from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. The rocket burned down in the thick layers of the atmosphere while the satellite after the Briz-M booster failed to separate from the spacecraft.

The high-ranking state official said there were two priorities for the development of the industry.

“Firstly, we need to increase the production of military-purpose spacecraft,” Rogozin said. “This is one of the defense priorities providing for the security of our country.”

“Secondly, we need high-tech spacecraft, which would meet all consumers’ demands across Russia with all types of communication, navigation, geodesy and cartography,” he added.

Rogozin also said that the strategy of import substitution in the domestic production of spacecraft would mean Russia’s “technological independence.”

Russia in recent years experienced a number of unsuccessful space launches. Prior to the May incident another Proton-M went down after the launch in 2013 failing to deliver three Glonass navigation satellites into orbit. Similar accidents happened in December 2010, in August 2011, and in August 2012.

Failures also haunted the launches of other Russian carrier rockets: Rokot with a geodesy satellite in February 2011 and Soyuz-U, which failed to orbit a Progress spacecraft carrying a cargo for the International Space Station (ISS) in August of 2011.

In November 2011, the Russian-Ukrainian Zenit-2SB rocket carrying the Fobos-Grunt space probe failed to reach the designated trajectory for its mission flight to Mars. The launch of a similar rocket carrying US telecommunications satellite Intelsat failed in February 2013.