Russia

Russia is the country that opened the space age and is, three quarters of a century later, the only major space program in clear absolute decline. The Soyuz family of launchers — direct descendants of the R-7 ICBM that lifted Sputnik in 1957 — has flown more than 1,900 missions, more than every other rocket in history combined. Soyuz crewed spacecraft have ferried astronauts and cosmonauts to every space station since Salyut 1 in 1971, including being the only crewed vehicle servicing the ISS for the entire 2011-2020 gap between the Shuttle's retirement and Crew Dragon's first flight. The R-7 family in 2026 is still flying, still mostly reliable, still operationally indispensable. It is also the most quietly unrenewed major piece of space infrastructure in the world.

Roscosmos as a corporate entity has been in restructure for most of the past decade. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine triggered the formal collapse of most Western commercial-launch arrangements with Russia (Soyuz operations from Kourou suspended; OneWeb satellites stranded on the pad; multiple Western payload contracts cancelled), the loss of the European ExoMars launch slot, and the gradual exclusion of Russian space components from Western supply chains. Commercial revenue from Western customers, which had been a meaningful slice of Roscosmos income through the 2010s, has effectively gone to zero.

What's left is the institutional program. The ISS partnership continues — Russian cosmonauts remain on every long-duration crew, Soyuz remains a backup crew-return vehicle, Roscosmos continues to operate the Russian segment (Zvezda, Nauka and Prichal modules). Roscosmos has publicly committed to a successor station, ROS (Russian Orbital Station), with the first module targeted for launch in 2027 and full assembly through the early 2030s. Western partners on ISS are now planning around the 2030 deorbit; Russia's plan is to deorbit the Russian segment first and bridge directly to ROS. Whether the budget is there to actually build ROS at the scheduled cadence is genuinely unclear.

The launcher fleet has been quietly contracting. Proton-M, the heavy-lift workhorse for fifty years, is being retired in favour of Angara-A5 — a modular hydrolox/kerolox vehicle that has flown only a handful of times since its 2014 maiden flight. Angara is genuinely capable but expensive and has no commercial customer base outside of Russian institutional missions. Soyuz-2 will continue flying for the foreseeable future. The Amur reusable methane-fuelled launcher is in design and unlikely to fly before 2030. There is no published roadmap for orbital reuse equivalent to what SpaceX, China, and the European cluster are pursuing.

On the commercial side, Russia has nothing equivalent to the post-2018 commercial waves in the US, China, India, or Japan. The relatively small commercial-space cohort that emerged in the 2010s (S7 Space, Dauria, GK Launch Services) was either acquired into the state structure or wound down. The 2020s have produced no notable Russian commercial-space startups visible to Western databases.

What Russia retains is operational competence. Soyuz is reliable in a way few launchers have ever been. The cosmonaut corps is highly experienced. Russian engineers continue to do excellent technical work on the ISS and on the relatively limited science programs Roscosmos can still afford (Spektr-RG astronomy, Luna-25 through 27 lunar landers — though Luna-25 was lost on landing in August 2023, a major institutional setback). The structural question for the 2030s is whether the program can survive at scale: if Western sanctions persist, the ROS station gets built on time, and Angara reaches commercial cadence, Russia ends the decade as a functional but smaller third-tier space power. If any of those don't happen, the world's first space program ends the 2020s as the world's seventh-largest.