Russia exits space race as war, sanctions cripple cosmic ambitions

Sixty-five years after Yuri Gagarin parachuted into a wheat field near the Volga River, Russia's state news agency TASS did not bother reporting on NASA's Artemis II lunar mission. A few Kremlin-friendly outlets mentioned problems with the spacecraft's toilet. Most simply ignored it. The silence was telling. Russia has quietly withdrawn from the space race, and the reasons are written across a landscape of failed missions, severed partnerships, and redirected resources.

The decline did not happen overnight. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, international sanctions began to erode the country's space ambitions. But the full reckoning came with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Vladimir Putin's government reprioritized everything. The space industry, once a source of national pride and international revenue, became a tool of war. Roscosmos—Russia's space agency—shifted from building rockets to building missiles. Satellites designed for exploration became surveillance and communications platforms for military operations. The civilian projects that had defined Russian cosmonautics for decades were pushed to the margins.

The Luna-25 mission in August 2023 exposed the damage. After 47 years without a lunar landing attempt, Russia sent an unmanned probe toward the Moon's south pole. The mission seemed to proceed normally until the critical moment. The engines burned 43 seconds longer than planned, throwing the spacecraft into the wrong trajectory. It crashed into the lunar surface. Vitali Yegórov, a Russian space expert, explained what had happened: sanctions after 2014 had forced the industry to use lower-quality electronics and heavier materials. The mission was doomed before it launched. "After 2022, another Luna-25 is impossible," Yegórov said. The technical infrastructure needed to build a replacement simply no longer existed. Russia would have to reinvent its entire supply chain, find new manufacturers, source different components. The expertise was there, but the capacity was not.

The financial picture made the situation worse. Before the war, Roscosmos earned roughly a quarter of its budget from international contracts. When the invasion began, those contracts evaporated. The European Space Agency canceled a joint Mars mission. Germany withdrew from a sky-scanning project. NASA excluded Russian cosmonauts from a Venus exploration program. Only China and India maintained nominal ties, but neither offered meaningful partnership. China's cooperation was largely rhetorical. India wanted to borrow Russian expertise, not collaborate as equals. Suddenly, Roscosmos found itself alone with the Russian state as its only customer. In 2025, the agency's budget was roughly 3.5 billion euros. NASA's budget was 21.75 billion euros—six times larger.

Yet paradoxically, Roscosmos received more public investment than ever before. The money simply went elsewhere. The state needed missiles and surveillance satellites for the war in Ukraine. Roscosmos delivered. The agency produced Kinzhal and Iskander missiles, the new Oreshnik system, and military communications platforms. Its director general, Dmitri Bakánov, told state media that 1,357 Roscosmos employees had left their jobs to fight on the front lines. He thanked them for their sacrifice. The civilian space program became secondary. "The state needs it, the state pays for it, and civilian projects become secondary," Yegórov said, his resignation evident.

The numbers told the story of collapse. In 2025, Russia launched 17 rockets—the lowest count since 1961, the year Gagarin flew. The United States launched 193. China launched 93. In 1990, the Soviet Union had conducted 79 launches while the United States managed 27 and China five. The reversal was complete. In November 2024, a crewed spacecraft bound for the International Space Station experienced an accident during launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. No one was injured, but the launch platform was disabled for three months. Russia could not send crewed missions to space—something that had not happened since 1961. Yegórov was the first to report the accident publicly. Two weeks later, authorities designated him a foreign agent.

Putin refuses to let Russian cosmonautics die entirely, but not for the reasons of exploration or scientific ambition. Crewed spaceflight remains a symbol of national power. Only three countries in the world can launch humans into space. Losing that capability would be a visible failure of Putin's governance. So the Kremlin maintains the minimum necessary to keep cosmonauts flying and orbital stations operational. But the ambitions have shrunk. Plans to return to the Moon, once scheduled for 2027, have been postponed to 2032. Even that timeline appears optimistic. Yegórov believes Russia can no longer compete independently, let alone mount a crewed lunar mission. The only realistic path to the Moon runs through Beijing. Roscosmos has developed a nuclear reactor designed to power lunar expeditions. If China agrees to deploy it on a future crewed mission, Russia might send one or two cosmonauts along—not as leaders, but as supporting players, there to symbolically activate the generator. It is a diminished role for a nation that once led the world into space.

Even if the war ends tomorrow, the damage will take decades to repair. International trust has been shattered. The partnerships that built the modern space age have been severed. The technical expertise remains, but the infrastructure, the supply chains, the international relationships—all of it will require years to rebuild. Yegórov is pessimistic. "Even if peace were signed, it would take decades to restore the authority of Russian cosmonautics, the capacity to mount new international projects, and to demonstrate that Russia is a reliable partner. In short, everything that was lost in 2022."