Every first that matters in spaceflight has a Soviet name on it - the first satellite, the first man and woman, the first spacewalk, the first space station, the first probe to touch another planet - which is exactly the problem, because the résumé is magnificent and almost entirely in the past tense. Soyuz still flies, the most-used crewed craft ever built, and it kept the ISS alive for decades, until the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 pulled the partnerships apart: Europe walked away from ExoMars, OneWeb left, the money stopped, and the budget fell to roughly a third of NASA's. When Luna-25 crashed into the Moon in 2023, India landed intact days later. The director general now says the ISS comes down in 2030, and Russia's next station will be built from modules it cuts off the old one before it falls, salvaged from the very thing it is abandoning. The firsts are permanent; whether there is a second act is not.
The first satellite was Russian. So was the first man in orbit, the first woman, the first spacewalk, the first probe to land on another planet, the first space station. For the better part of two decades, almost every sentence in the history of spaceflight that began with "the first" ended with a Soviet name.
That is the whole problem with the file: the résumé is magnificent and almost entirely in the past tense.
It opens in October 1957. Sputnik - a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball, doing nothing but beeping - went up and put the United States into a decade-long panic. The beep was the point: anyone with a shortwave radio could hear the Soviet Union pass overhead. Four years later Yuri Gagarin rode a Vostok capsule once around the Earth and came back the most famous man alive. Valentina Tereshkova followed in 1963, Alexei Leonov climbed out of his spacecraft into open space in 1965. Soviet landers reached the Moon, photographed its far side, and scooped up soil by robot. The Venera probes did the genuinely insane thing and set down on Venus, sending pictures back from a surface hot enough to melt lead before the heat killed them.
They did not, however, win the part everyone remembers. The Moon race came down to a giant rocket called the N1 that failed all four times it flew, and the cosmonauts who trained to walk on the Moon never left Earth. They were first at almost everything and second only at the one thing with a flag in it.
What carried the program through the next half-century was Soyuz. The capsule first flew in the 1960s and still flies now, the most-used crewed spacecraft ever built. When the Space Shuttle was grounded after Columbia, and again after it retired in 2011, Soyuz was the only ride to the ISS - every American astronaut for most of a decade reached orbit on a Russian rocket, at up to 90 million dollars a seat. Roscosmos founded the station's Russian half with the Zarya module in 1998, and for twenty-five years that partnership held while the politics on the ground did not.
That held until February 2022. After the invasion of Ukraine the cooperation came apart in months. Europe walked away from the joint ExoMars rover and left it without a ride. OneWeb pulled its satellites off Soyuz and handed them to SpaceX and India. The launch pad the Russians operated in French Guiana went quiet. The seat-swaps with NASA continued - they still do, because the station needs both halves alive to stay up - but the money that used to come with them stopped, and NASA buys its rides from SpaceX now.
The numbers carry the rest of the story. Roscosmos runs on roughly 2.8 billion dollars a year, around 70 percent of its old budget, against a NASA closer to ten times larger. Something like 90 percent of the components its satellites depended on came from the West, and sanctions shut that door. Kazakhstan, which owns the ground under the Baikonur cosmodrome, began seizing Russian assets over unpaid rent, and the engineers who could leave did.
The clearest picture of where that leaves them arrived in August 2023. Roscosmos sent Luna-25 to the Moon's south pole - its first lunar mission since 1976, a 47-year gap - and it crashed into the surface during a routine manoeuvre. India's Chandrayaan-3 set down intact a few days later, and the two events, side by side, were the whole file in miniature.
The current Director General, Dmitry Bakanov, says the ISS will be wound down from 2028 and brought out of the sky in 2030. Russia's answer is the Russian Orbital Station, and the plan for it keeps changing. The version settled at the end of 2025 is the most telling one yet: rather than build something new, Russia will cut its own modules off the dying ISS and fly the next station out of what it salvages, starting around 2028 and finished by 2035, crewed in stretches rather than lived in continuously to save money and limit how much radiation cosmonauts soak up - a station assembled from the parts of the one they are leaving.
Where the West walked out, China walked in. Roscosmos and China have signed on together for a lunar base in the 2030s, with Russia the junior partner in a project it would once have run alone. At home the board still has ambition on it: a new crew capsule called Oryol, the medium-lift Soyuz-5 and a reusable methalox Soyuz-7, another run at the Moon with Luna-26 and 27. Whether any of it flies on schedule is the question hanging over every line above.
The firsts are real and they are permanent. Nobody lands on the Moon before Luna-2 did, or beats Gagarin to orbit. The only thing this file cannot tell you yet is whether there is a second act, or just a long and careful curation of the first.