International anti-Russian sanctions and the reluctance of leading global companies to cooperate with Russia in the field of peaceful space exploration have effectively pushed Russia out of the global race to colonize the Moon. Today, the competition is between the United States and China. The Americans plan to land astronauts on the Moon no earlier than mid-2027, while China speaks of its own taikonaut mission by 2030.
Russia’s enormous budget expenditures on the war against Ukraine, coupled with a lack of technology and equipment, have turned its space industry from a national favorite into a burden on the state budget. Due to sanctions, even international commercial clients—which used to provide up to 25% of revenue through commercial launches—have turned away. In practice, Russia today can only collaborate with countries in Asia and Africa, but even there Chinese competitors are successfully taking the lead. The budget of Roscosmos last year was approximately $4.15 billion, compared to NASA (USA) – $25.4 billion, plus $34 billion for military space programs and $6.6 billion for space meteorology programs, and the CNSA (China) budget – up to $20 billion.
With the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine, Russia lost the ability to participate in many international space programs. Cooperation with the European Space Agency on the ExoMars mission to search for life on Mars has been suspended; Germany has withdrawn from the joint “Spektr-RG” project for sky scanning. Roscosmos has also “refused” to launch rockets from the spaceport in French Guiana. Sanctions have made it impossible for NASA to participate in the joint Russian project “Venera-D”—an automated interplanetary station to study Venus, whose launch was planned for 2029.
The current state of Russia’s space industry was summed up best by Igor Maltsev, director of the Russian Rocket and Space Corporation Energia: “We need to stop lying to ourselves and to others that everything is fine.”
