Russia Falls Further Behind in the Space Race as Kazakhstan Turns to China

The bell may be tolling for a long-standing Russian-Kazakh space program following the launch of a “nanosatellite” jointly developed by Kazakhstan and China and launched into orbit by a Chinese rocket. The launch of the Dier-5 spacecraft on December 13 placed the satellite into an orbit roughly 330 miles above Earth, according to a Kazakh government statement. It took a team of specialists from Kazakhstan’s Al-Farabi University and Northeastern Polytechnical University in Xi’an, China, just a little over one year to develop…