On Saturday, the Russian space program lost the Luna 25 spacecraft, a relatively small vehicle that was due to land on the Moon this week. After a problem with the spacecraft's propulsion system, instead of entering a low orbit around the Moon, it crashed into the lunar surface.
The Russian mission to the Moon was one of several spacecraft that were to attempt a landing on the Moon in the next six months, alongside probes from Japan, India, and the United States. In this sense, Russia is just one of many nations participating in a second space race back to the Moon, alongside nations and private companies alike.
But unlike NASA, China, India, and several companies in the United States and Japan, the Luna 25 effort does not presage the coming of a golden era of exploration for Russia. Rather, it is more properly seen as the last gasp of a dying empire, an attempt by the modern state of Russia, and President Vladimir Putin, to revive old glories.
And now it has failed. Here's why this is such a death knell for Russia's civil space program under Putin's leadership.
The country’s space technology dates to Apollo
The first Soyuz spacecraft launched in 1967, two years before the first Apollo Moon landing. The crew vehicle served the Soviet space program through 1991 and since then has been a mainstay for the country's large space corporation, Roscosmos. The Soyuz is a hardy, generally reliable vehicle that NASA counted on for crew transport from 2011 to 2020, after the space shuttle's retirement and before SpaceX's Crew Dragon came into service.
The Soyuz spacecraft, as well as a lot of the country's other satellites, launches into orbit on the Soyuz rocket. This vehicle dates back even a bit further, to 1966. Russian engineers have modified and modernized both the spacecraft and rocket over time, but they remain essentially the same space vehicles.
There's nothing wrong with aging technology that works. However, there have been some issues of late with leaks and other problems that have raised serious questions about quality control and the ability of the Russians to manufacture these vehicles.
But for now, they work. The bigger problem is that there is precious little new hardware in the pipeline. A modern replacement for the Soyuz spacecraft, "Orel," is perpetually five to seven years away from flight, which essentially means never. A replacement space station, ROSS, remains in the vaporware stage of development. And then there is the Soyuz-5 rocket, a three-stage rocket powered by RD-171 engines that will burn kerosene fuel and compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket on price. This vehicle, too, has a future launch date that keeps slipping.
Putin puts his prestige on the line
Before the launch of Luna 25, Putin made it clear that this mission was important for Russia as a signal that the country was returning to great power status. He met with the current head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, on June 30 before the launch to hear more about the lunar mission.
The symbolism of the Russian space program is important to the nation, as achieving "firsts" such as the first satellite, man, and woman in orbit six decades ago marked key geopolitical wins for the Soviet Union during the Cold War against the United States. Since then, Russians have expected their country to be doing important things in space.
Sometimes such strength has been difficult to project, especially since Russia is flying the same vehicles as it did during Leonid Brezhnev's tenure as the Soviet ruler, and has only flown to the International Space Station for a quarter of a century. Desperate for an achievement on the 60th anniversary of Gagarin's flight in 2021, Russia's answer was to film The Challenge, billed as the "first" feature film made in space.
Critically, Luna 25 was to mark the reopening of Russia's interests on the Moon. It was a relatively modest mission, with a mass of about 1 metric ton, and far smaller than the Luna missions the Soviets sent to the Moon half a century ago. But it was the nation's first trip back to the Moon in 46 years and would at least allow Putin to credibly claim that Russia was back.
In reality, Putin gutted the space program
The reality that Putin seeks to mask is that Russia's space program is a shadow of its former glory. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, every deep space probe—intended for Mars, the Moon, or Venus—has either failed or been delayed long enough such that it almost certainly will never fly.
Putin has allowed corruption to run rampant in the country's space industry. One of Roscosmos' biggest projects over the last decade has been the construction of the Vostochny spaceport in far Eastern Russia. However, this project has fallen years behind schedule and has been rife with corruption.
Then, in 2021, Putin decided to cut the state budget for space activities by 16 percent per year. The country's space employees were already paid extremely low wages. With the cuts, there were even fewer resources to invest into future programs. This leaves only dwindling funding to maintain the country's existing civil space capabilities and try to stave off quality control issues.
But perhaps the gravest wound that Putin dealt Roscosmos was installing Dmitry Rogozin, a militant nationalist politician, as its director in 2018. Rogozin brought a pugnacious leadership style into the role, rubbing his Western allies the wrong way. He also was reportedly very corrupt as well, purchasing luxury vehicles and a dacha for himself. Under his leadership, the quality control problems at Roscosmos worsened.
Russian space editor Andrei Borisov captured the fading zeitgeist of the Russian space program in a lengthy article on Rogozin a few years ago. "The 'Russian Space' Rogozin is trying to create reminds one of the Dark Ages in Europe," Borisov wrote for Lenta.Ru, where he served as editor of science and technology. "In it, there is no place for modernization, there is only the mission of survival."
Rogozin is already getting some of the blame for the Luna 25 failure. In an interview with a St. Petersburg-based website, Fontanka.ru, Russian space expert Vladislav Shevchenko of Moscow State University said Rogozin never valued the lunar mission for its scientific aims. Rogozin, Shevchenko noted, once dismissed specialists who wanted to do applied science on the Moon as "modern Jules Vernes." Shevchenko said Rogozin's neglect of Roscosmos contributed to the probe's failure.
"His activity led in the end to what just happened," Shevchenko said in an interview, translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell. "How the current leadership of the company will respond, we’ll have to wait and see. It seems the current director has said that there will be a Luna 26, a Luna 27, but such a fatal half-century break (from lunar exploration) cannot but have had some effect."
Ukraine War, from bad to worse
Things got much worse for the space program when Russia invaded Ukraine. Rogozin took his rhetoric to another level, making frequent threats about how Russia would end its partnership with NASA on the International Space Station. He also used the space program as a platform to promote the war. Eventually, Putin tired of Rogozin's antics and sacked him in July 2022.
The war in Ukraine ended Russia's cooperation with the European Space Agency, losing out on key funding. For medium-lift missions, Europe purchased as many as a half-dozen Soyuz rockets a year. The war also forced a break between Russia and Europe on the ExoMars mission, which would have allowed Russia to finally claim a successful interplanetary mission after decades of failure. Rogozin's response to this seemed to be projection, as he called the director general of the European Space Agency, Josef Aschbacher, an "irresponsible bureaucrat." (Aschbacher is a noted Earth scientist.)
All of this brings us to today. The Russian civil space program is in shambles. Putin has attempted to use smoke and mirrors to convince his population that the country still is a world leader on the global stage for space exploration. But Russia has fallen far behind China in spaceflight. (China landed three probes on the Moon in the last decade, including an ambitious sample return mission in 2020). For the time being, with its human spaceflight capability, Russia remains on par with the European Space Agency and slightly ahead of India. But it could fall behind both in the coming decade, with Japan not far behind, either.
Despite a successful, decades-long partnership with NASA and the United States, Russia is turning away from the West for its future plans. Already, it has partnered with China on its plans to build a lunar space station in the coming decades. But it is clear that Russia will be nothing more than a junior partner of China, going as far as China goes on the Moon and as far as China will permit its vassal to participate.
The leash, undoubtedly, will be short.
