Russia's Space Program Is Another Casualty of the War in Ukraine

Scientific American

a day ago

As president, Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire for a U.S. rapprochement with Russia, in distinct contrast with the policies of previous administrations. On June 16, for instance, he called Russia's expulsion from the elite Group of Seven (G7) forum of major advanced economies a 'mistake.' (The nation was expelled in 2014 after it annexed Crimea in Ukraine.) And Trump has been far more lenient than his presidential predecessors in pursuing sanctions on Russia related to its war with Ukraine while also imposing relatively minimal tariffs on the nation as part of his overarching effort to realign global trade.
Some experts have speculated that this high-level thaw in U.S.-Russia relations could extend to the nations' cooperation on the high frontier. The U.S. and Russia are already close partners on the International Space Station (ISS); NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, have worked together for more than 30 years to build and operate the orbital habitat.
Despite ongoing geopolitical tensions, in April Roscosmos's director general Dmitry Bakanov and NASA associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox met at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to discuss the status of the ISS partnership, which includes 'cross-flights' of U.S. astronauts on Russian rockets—and vice versa. Soon afterward, NASA confirmed the agencies had coordinated crew changes for upcoming cross-flights and extended the corresponding agreement through 2027.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
'NASA, Roscosmos and our other international partners remain focused on the continued safe and professional operation of the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit,' a NASA spokesperson tells Scientific American. 'International Space Station cooperation continues smoothly, as it has throughout the continuous presence of our joint crews for nearly 25 years.'
Even so, this partnership has an expiration date: NASA's current plan is for the ISS to be abandoned and deorbited by 2031. And apart from the ISS, these days, the two countries have minimal collaboration on space science and exploration.
For instance, Russia has been conspicuously absent from the long-simmering U.S. efforts to return astronauts to the moon via NASA's Artemis program. Instead Roscosmos is pursuing an independent plan for robotic and crewed lunar exploration, and in 2021 it announced a partnership with China to construct a crewed moon base. Although neither Russia nor China have been especially forthcoming about the finer details and status of such plans, recent statements from Gennady Krasnikov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), during a general meeting of RAS members at the end of May suggest that Russia is attempting to accelerate its lunar program, which will unfold across multiple missions.
'As for the lunar program, it includes seven lunar missions with various scientific objectives,' Krasnikov said. 'At the first stage of the study, our research works will be based on automatic flights.' Some, if not all, of these missions will target the moon's north and south poles, where significant deposits of water ice have been discovered. 'We also plan to send lunar rovers to study the area and prepare for the placement of a future lunar station,' Krasnikov said. 'This is a large and very important program and, of course, a serious challenge for our academic institutions.'
Lev Zelenyi, chief research officer of the Space Research Institute, the leading organization within RAS on space exploration, tells Scientific American he has modest hopes for deeper cooperation between the U.S. and Russia in the space sector.
'Naturally, I see potential and hope that it will be realized in something concrete—although it is difficult to say what it will be yet,' Zelenyi says. 'However, in the case of the Russian lunar program, it is going its own way, and I do not see great prospects for cooperation here.'
One potential area ripe for partnership, he adds, is Venus—a world that only the Soviet-era Russian space program has ever managed to land on. It remains a tempting destination for Russia's modern-day interplanetary probes. Bakanov, for example, treats Russia's return there as a foregone conclusion. In a recent Telegram post, he declared, 'We will explore Venus; we are the only country that has landed a device on it.'
'It seems promising to me to resume cooperation in Venus exploration programs,' Zelenyi says. 'Both Russia and the United States have great interest in this planet and have serious programs for its study. In my opinion, a meeting of Russian and American scientists to discuss all these issues would be useful. It could be held under the auspices of our [respective] academies of sciences, as both have their own space councils.'
Still, despite such measured optimism, independent analysts of Russia's space activities believe it will be difficult for the nation to resume large-scale cooperation with the U.S. in this domain. In the case of Venus, one obstacle is that the White House has signaled it has other priorities for NASA. For instance, it has proposed to cancel the space agency's two planned Venus-focused missions, and to eliminate NASA's involvement in Envision, a Venus mission led by the European Space Agency (ESA). More broadly, Russia's war in Ukraine remains the chief stumbling block—not only because of the backlash it fostered from the U.S. and European allies but also because the war effort has strained Russia's coffers and distracted its scientific and technical workforce. All this has contributed to recent financial cuts and technical delays for Russia's space program.
Vadim Lukashevich, an aerospace expert and a former designer at aerospace design bureau Sukhoi, tells Scientific American that because Russia's modern lunar program was developed before the Russian-Ukrainian war and the associated unprecedented international sanctions on Russia's economy, the planning had assumed active international cooperation, including with NASA.
'The first joint projects of NASA and Roscosmos in lunar orbit were considered possible as early as 2024,' Lukashevich says, referring to NASA's Gateway project, which is meant to be a 'way station' of sorts in high lunar orbit (and which the White House also has targeted for cancellation as part of its sweeping proposed cuts). 'It was expected that Russia had the most serious competencies in the field of creating habitable modules, which, together with a new [crewed] ship and superheavy rocket, would provide Russia with a strategically advantageous role in the international program for the exploration of the moon.'
According to Lukashevich and other Russian scientists interviewed for this story, Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, upended those carefully laid plans, dramatically changing the nation's prospects for near-term progress in space. Now funding cuts and technical problems have curtailed plans for a new crewed spacecraft. Called Orel —Russian for 'eagle'—the project has been officially in development for more than a decade, and its first uncrewed test flight was targeted for 2023. That flight has now slipped to no earlier than 2028—and its intended launch vehicle, a modified Angara-A5 rocket, is still being designed.
A similar cascade of delays and cuts is affecting other parts of Russia's space infrastructure, too. The superheavy Yenisei rocket intended for the nation's lunar missions had reached a critical milestone, the approval of its preliminary design, in late 2019. But today Yenisei's development is on hiatus because of a lack of funds, and the projected time frame for the first crewed flight to the moon has receded to an ill-defined target date in the 2030s. And in November 2024 Roscosmos announced that the already approved draft design of Yenisei 'will be finalized at the technical design stage' and that 'flights of Russian cosmonauts to the moon are postponed.'
Hoped-for bright spots in this gloomy outlook have failed to materialize. In April 2022 the ESA, responding to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, pulled out of multiple planned Russian robotic lunar missions. In August 2023, under the management of Zelenyi, Russia plowed ahead on its own, launching its robotic Luna-25 lunar lander, but the spacecraft malfunctioned during an orbital maneuver and crashed to the moon's surface. In July 2022 ESA also officially nixed Russia's participation in ExoMars, an ESA-led robotic mission to the Red Planet. To relay ESA's Rosalind Franklin rover to the Martian surface, Roscosmos had been due to deliver a lander called Kazachok; ESA subsequently turned to NASA for a lander, although those plans are now in question because of the White House's proposed cuts to NASA's budget, and the mission is unlikely to launch before 2028.
The demonstrable diminution of Russia's space-exploration capabilities and plans makes the nation's need for partnerships all the more urgent—and, some analysts say, all the harder to come by because Russia seemingly has less to offer potential partners. This is a departure from previous eras in which Russia's prowess with rocketry and space stations enticed even the U.S., its cold war adversary, into multiple human spaceflight collaborations, with the jointly operated ISS as the relationship's crown jewel.
And back then, even if the U.S. had been unable or unwilling to partner with Russia in support of its peaceful space activities, a more subtle partnership was inescapable because some workhorse U.S. rockets relied upon Russian-made engines. Now, however, that's no longer the case, says Pavel Koshkin, a senior research fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies. 'While the program of cross-flights to the ISS still exists, the United States abandoned Russian RD-180 engines for its Atlas V launch vehicles in 2024, finding a domestic alternative to them of its own production,' Koshkin says. 'And this trend is unlikely to change in the near future despite Trump's favorable attitude towards Russia.'