Russia’s era as a dominant force in space exploration has effectively come to an end. This grim reality, often obscured by state propaganda, was recently acknowledged by top figures in the Russian scientific community. Speaking at the Russian Space Forum, Lev Zelyony, the scientific director of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, confirmed that the country has decisively lost its status among the world’s leading space powers.
According to the academician, Russia has completely abandoned plans for crewed deep-space missions, including any human expeditions to the Moon, for at least the next decade. The only major project remaining in Roscosmos’s severely reduced portfolio is the theoretical development of a new national orbital station—a venture that many independent experts view with profound skepticism given the industry’s current trajectory.
The statistical reality of Russia’s aerospace sector underscores this dramatic decline. In a recent report to Vladimir Putin, Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov revealed that Roscosmos executed merely 17 space launches over the past year. This figure remains entirely stagnant compared to previous years and embarrassingly places Russia on par with New Zealand, which also completed 17 orbital missions.
When compared to genuine global aerospace leaders, the gap is staggering. The United States continues to dominate the sector, successfully increasing its launch cadence from 145 to 181 over the same period. China has also solidified its formidable position, growing its launch numbers from 68 to 91. Consequently, Russia now lags behind the US by more than tenfold and is outperformed by Beijing by a factor of five. Excluding the anomalies of the global pandemic period, Russia’s current launch rate has plummeted to its absolute lowest level since 1961—the year Yuri Gagarin made history with just nine launches.
Despite the undeniable and catastrophic statistics, Roscosmos leadership attempts to project forced optimism. Grigory Maksimov, the corporation’s deputy general director, boldly claims that a strategic plan is in place to propel Russia back into the top three global space powers within the next four years. However, independent analysts remain highly critical of these statements. Vitaly Egorov, a prominent aerospace expert, pointed out that the cracks are already visible: out of 20 missions planned for the upcoming year, three have already been indefinitely delayed.
The bleak reality of the Russian space program stands in stark contrast to the grandiose rhetoric of officials like Sergey Chernyshov, Vice President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who previously boasted about establishing Russian “sovereign territories” on the lunar surface. The true state of their technological capabilities was mercilessly exposed in August 2023, when the highly publicized Luna-25 probe catastrophically crashed into the Moon. This resulted in a humiliating failure that the Kremlin was forced to publicly address. Today, Russia’s space industry is defined not by exploration or innovation, but by geopolitical isolation and systemic decay.