What is "glavcosmos"

Glavcosmos was established in 1985 under the Ministry of General Machine Building (MOM) as the Soviet Union's contract agency for space affairs by the government of Mikhail Gorbachev appointing Alexander Dunayev as its first director. Although it was originally envisioned to command all Soviet space activities it worked more as a marketing and coordinating body than an executive agency.

In Soviet times it was the prime authority for implementing co-operative agreements with foreign bodies, with activities including commercial utilisation of Soviet systems and flying foreign cosmonauts aboard Soviet spacecraft. After the breakup of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Russian Federal Space Agency it is concerned with converting military technology to civil applications and commercialisation of Russian space technology.