Roscosmos

• 1. Introduction

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  Roscosmos, the State Corporation for Space Activities of the Russian Federation, is the inheritor of a program that once raced the United States to the Moon. On the 25th of February 1992, barely weeks after the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist, President Yeltsin signed the decree that brought the Russian Space Agency into being. It was a bureaucratic birth, but the organisation it created carried a staggering legacy: the world's first spaceport at Baikonur in Kazakhstan, the most flown crewed spacecraft in history in the Soyuz, and decades of hard-won expertise in keeping humans alive in orbit.

  What followed was anything but smooth. The 1990s brought financial collapse. The 2000s brought revival and ambition. The 2010s brought scandal, restructuring, and a return to state control. And the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine changed everything again, severing partnerships that had lasted decades and costing the agency an estimated 180 billion rubles in lost export revenues. How did an organisation that once set the pace for all of humanity in space reach a point where it was on track to conduct its fewest orbital launches since 1961? That is the story Roscosmos tells.

• 2. A Bureaucracy Built From Chaos

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  Yuri Koptev, the first director of the Russian Space Agency, came to the job with experience designing Mars landers at NPO Lavochkin. The agency he took charge of in 1992 was new in name but hemmed in by old power structures. The Soviet space program had never operated through a central executive body. Authority had rested with the design bureaus, the engineers' collectives whose internal politics and institutional rivalries had shaped every mission.

  In the early years, those bureaus resisted any erosion of their independence. The decision to keep the Mir space station running beyond 1999, for instance, was not made by the agency at all. It was made by the private shareholder board of the Energia design bureau. Similarly, the choice to develop the Angara rocket reflected Khrunichev's ability to attract resources more than any deliberate long-term plan from the agency itself.

  Through the 1990s, reduced cash flow forced the agency to improvise. Commercial satellite launches and space tourism became lifelines. Scientific missions to the planets were largely shelved. Yet even in those stripped-down years, the agency kept Mir running well beyond its planned lifespan, continued flying Soyuz and Progress missions, and in 1994 renewed its lease on the Baikonur Cosmodrome with the government of Kazakhstan.

• 3. Expedition One and the ISS Years

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  On the 31st of October 2000, a Soyuz spacecraft lifted off from Baikonur at 10:53 in the morning Kazakhstan time. On board were NASA Commander William M. Shepherd and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko. They arrived at the International Space Station on the 2nd of November, beginning an uninterrupted human presence in orbit that has continued ever since.

  Roscosmos had actually helped found the station. The Zarya module, launched in 1998 aboard a Proton rocket, was the station's first component. Zvezda followed, also on a Proton. Together those two modules formed the backbone onto which NASA's Unity and later additions were connected. The Nauka module, initially planned for launch in 2007, was repeatedly delayed before finally docking with the station in July 2021.

  The financial terms of the partnership were substantial. After the initial ISS contract with NASA expired, Roscosmos negotiated a new arrangement under which it sold NASA seats on Soyuz spacecraft at roughly $21 million per person each way, with Progress resupply flights priced at $50 million each. At one point NASA had bought 71 return trips on Soyuz for close to $4 billion over six years. The arrangement funded the agency through years when its own budgets were tight. It also meant that when the relationship fractured after 2022, the financial damage on both sides was enormous.

• 4. Budget Boom and Hidden Rot

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  By March 2004, Yuri Koptev had been replaced as director by Anatoly Perminov, a former commander of the Space Forces. The timing coincided with a broader turn in Russia's fortunes. High global prices for oil and gas filled state coffers, and in 2006 the Russian Duma approved a ten-year space budget of 305 billion rubles, roughly $11 billion, running to 2015. The 2006 annual budget alone was 25 billion rubles, a 33 percent increase on the year before.

  Navigation technology was a particular priority. The GLONASS global satellite navigation system received 9.9 billion rubles in 2007, and a directive signed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in 2008 allocated an additional $2.6 billion for its development. Separately, new science satellites came online: Koronas Foton launched in January 2009, Spektr R in July 2011, and Spektr RG in 2019.

  Beneath the numbers, structural problems persisted. Up to 50 percent of Russia's space budget was absorbed by the crewed spaceflight program because of ISS commitments, leaving little room for planetary science or new technology. In 2007, the average age of employees in the space industry was 46, wages were low, and much of the equipment was outdated. On the 29th of April 2011, Perminov was replaced by Vladimir Popovkin, partly because at 65 he had exceeded the legal age for state officials, and partly because of criticism following a failed GLONASS launch in December 2010.

• 5. Crisis, Scandal, and Re-Nationalisation

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  A Proton-M rocket failed on launch in July 2013, and the consequences went far beyond the loss of the vehicle. The Russian government declared that "extremely harsh measures" would follow, and within days announced what amounted to a wholesale restructuring of the space industry. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the sector was so failure-prone that it required direct state supervision. He also offered a striking comparison: Russia's space sector employed around 250,000 people, he said, while the United States needed only 70,000 to achieve similar results, with Russian space productivity running at roughly eight times lower than America's and companies operating at about 40 percent efficiency.

  The government formed the United Rocket and Space Corporation in August 2013 to consolidate the industry. Despite that, two more Proton failures occurred in 2014 and 2015. In December 2015, Putin signed the decree abolishing Roscosmos as a state agency, replacing it with a state-run corporation effective the 1st of January 2016. All of Russia's rocket engine companies, including NPO Energomash, were merged into the new structure in June 2015.

  In November 2018, Alexei Kudrin, head of Russia's financial audit agency, named Roscosmos as the public enterprise with the highest losses, citing irrational spending and outright theft and corruption under the leadership of Igor Komarov, who had been removed in May 2018. Putin then selected Rogozin himself to head the corporation, a choice that would have consequences visible within a few years.

• 6. Geckos, Geology, and Science on the Margins

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  On the 19th of July 2014, Roscosmos launched the Foton-M4 satellite. Among its passengers were five geckos, four females and one male, part of the Gecko-F4 research program designed to measure how weightlessness affected the lizards' ability to reproduce and develop. Mission control lost contact with the vessel shortly after it left the atmosphere, and communication was only restored later in the mission. When the satellite returned to Earth after 44 days, a mission cut short from a planned two months, all five geckos were dead.

  Researchers from the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems reported that the lizards appeared to have died at least a week before landing. Several scientists connected to the mission theorised that a failure in the spacecraft's heating system had caused the cold-blooded animals to freeze. The precise cause was never officially established. The fruit flies, plants, and mushrooms aboard the same satellite all survived.

  The episode illustrated something about Roscosmos's scientific programme more broadly: ambitious in conception, underfunded in execution, and prone to mechanical failure at the worst moments. The agency operates a range of Earth observation and meteorological satellites, including the Elektro-L and Meteor-M series, and the Spektr-RG space telescope remains operational. But planetary science has struggled. The Mars 96 mission failed. Fobos-Grunt was lost in low Earth orbit in 2011 and crashed back to Earth in 2012. Luna 25, a lander dispatched to the Moon in 2023 as the opening mission of the Luna-Glob program, also crashed.

• 7. Ukraine, Isolation, and the Shrinking Market

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  Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022, the international partnerships Roscosmos had spent decades building unravelled quickly. Rogozin suspended Roscosmos participation at the European Space Agency's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana in early March 2022. He also announced the suspension of RD-181 engine deliveries used in the Northrop Grumman Antares-Cygnus cargo system. The European Space Agency suspended cooperation on the ExoMars rover mission in late March 2022. OneWeb, previously a Roscosmos launch customer, signed contracts with ISRO and SpaceX instead.

  On the 2nd of May 2022, Rogozin announced that Roscosmos would terminate its involvement in the ISS with twelve months' notice. He was removed as chief executive in July 2022 and replaced by Yury Borisov, who moved to stabilise relations with ISS partners. The damage, however, was already extensive. By February 2024, Borisov reported losses of 180 billion rubles in export revenues, roughly $2.1 billion, mostly from engine sales and launch services. The agency had lost 90 percent of its launch service contracts since the war began.

  The global space-launch market was valued at $12.4 billion in 2021 and was forecast to reach $38 billion by the end of the decade. Roscosmos's share of that growth was projected to fall as competitors including SpaceX, Blue Origin, ISRO, and Japanese providers expanded. As of mid-2024, Russia was on track to conduct its fewest orbital launches since 1961, with only nine launches recorded by the 15th of August of that year.

• 8. What Comes Next

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  Roscosmos's plans for the future are expansive on paper. The agency is developing the Orel crewed spacecraft, intended for a first uncrewed test flight in 2028. The Yenisei super-heavy rocket, capable of lifting 103,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, is also planned for 2028 and would be the first such vehicle developed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. A larger derivative, the Don, with a payload capacity of 140,000 kilograms, is targeted for the 2032-2035 window.

  On the Moon, the Luna-Glob program envisions seven missions from 2023 into the 2030s, covering orbiters, polar landers, and a sample return, though the programme began with the loss of Luna 25. In March 2021, Roscosmos signed a memorandum with the China National Space Administration for the cooperative construction of a lunar base, the International Lunar Research Station, joined by eleven other countries. The Russian Orbital Station, planned to begin construction from the ISS's Nauka module, is expected to be completed by 2032 at a cost of 609 billion rubles.

  The agency's first deputy director indicated that Roscosmos may not achieve profitability until 2025. Meanwhile, from 2025, Roscosmos has been headquartered at the new National Space Centre in the Moscow district of Fili, a move that at least gives the organisation a modern address. Whether the next generation of rockets, stations, and lunar missions can be built with the resources available, and without the Western partnerships that once helped fund them, is the question the agency now has to answer.