Americans should show more respect for Russian space programme, boss says as he mocks Trump's 'hysteria'

Successful SpaceX launch led to 'nothing but jokes and mockery directed at us', Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin writes

In this handout image supplied by the European Space Agency (ESA), The Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft is rolled out by train from the MIK 112 integration facility to the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch pad 1 (ESA - Stephane Corvaja via Getty Images)

Americans should show more respect for Russia's space programme rather than attacking it with "jokes and mockery", its head has said.

For years, Nasa has relied on Russia's Roscosmos to carry its astronauts into space, since the US did not have the capability on its own. Last month, Nasa sent people into space from US soil for the first time in almost a decade, using a SpaceX rocket.

In the wake of that launch, Donald Trump said that the success showed that the US was once again the world leader in space. But Roscosmos boss Dmitry Rogozin mocked that launch, saying that he failed to understand the "hysteria" that had surrounded the event and the president's comments on it.

Now Rogozin has said that Americans should show more respect for the Russian space programme, given the fact it relied on it for so many years. Between the end of the Space Shuttle programme in 2011 and last week's launch, Americans had to travel to the International Space Station on Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

In a column in this week's Russian version of Forbes, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, lamented that Americans still do not take the Russian space programme as seriously as their own.

"When our partners finally managed to conduct a successful test on their spacecraft, there were nothing but jokes and mockery directed at us," Rogozin complained. Instead, the American space industry should have thanked Russia.

"Our country was the first to send a man into space," Rogozin wrote. "We remain first to this day."

Roscosmos has in recent years suffered a series of setbacks and corruption scandals, including during the construction of the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the country's far east.

It criticised U.S. President Donald Trump's "hysteria" after he said the SpaceX launch showed the United States had regained its place as the world's leader in space.

Trump also said U.S. astronauts would soon land on Mars, and that Washington would soon have "the greatest weapons ever imagined in history."

Additional reporting by agencies