The HillOpinion
Opinion - Russia is out of the human spaceflight business — for nowMark R. Whittington, opinion contributor
Sun, December 7, 2025 at 10:00 PM EST
4 min read
A Soyuz rocket lifted off from the Site 31 pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan recently, carrying Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, and NASA astronaut Christopher Williams to the International Space Station.
The journey went off without incident, but the launch left such destruction in its wake that it may well have ended Russia’s storied history of human spaceflight.
According to Ars Technica, someone failed to secure a 20-ton service platform that is used for workers to access the engines of the Soyuz rocket before launch. The rocket’s thrust ejected the platform into the flame trench, trashing the launch pad and rendering it inoperable for the foreseeable future.
Since the Site 31 pad is the only one operated by Roscosmos capable of launching both the crewed Soyuz rocket and the Progress cargo carrier, Russia is no longer able to access the International Space Station. The situation has ramifications for both the ISS and Russia’s future as a space power.
Officially, the Russians are upbeat about their ability to restore Site 31 with all due speed. Outside observers of the Russian space program are not so sure.
Leaving aside the culture of corruption and mismanagement that has plagued the Russian space program in recent years, a great many resources that might have been used to rebuild Site 31 are instead feeding Putin’s misbegotten, imperialist war in Ukraine.
Add to that the economic sanctions that the West has imposed on Russia to punish it for its aggression, the betting is that the country that once astonished the world with the first satellite and the first man in space is out of the human spaceflight business for the foreseeable future.
Russia is certainly not like SpaceX, which has bounced back from a number of similar catastrophes relatively quickly.
The effects on the continued operation of the ISS will soon be apparent. The Progress cargo carrier is used to periodically reboost the orbiting space lab and to “desaturate” its gyroscopes.
The SpaceX Dragon and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus have been used to reboost the station, so those are probably work-arounds.
Progress is also used as a tanker to refuel the Russian-built thrusters on the ISS. The thrusters will be important, should the space station have to avoid space debris.
Developing a new means to refuel the thrusters is a bigger problem. Could the Progress be launched on another rocket, say a Falcon 9? Could a Cargo Dragon be configured as a tanker? One would hope that Elon Musk has his SpaceX engineers working on the problem.
The greater issue that the accident has highlighted is the question of Russia’s place in the world. Putin considers himself the second coming of Czar Peter the Great. Peter helped make Russia into a world power. Putin would like to restore his country’s strength and influence lost when the Soviet Union fell.
The difference between Putin and Peter the Great is that Czar Peter not only won his wars against the Swedes and Turks but kept up good relations with European countries such as England and the Netherlands. Peter’s Russia benefited from Western engineering and science.
Putin is bogged down in Ukraine, spending lives and treasure that might be better applied to Russia’s space effort. He has also alienated the West and is now bereft of alliances that might have derived to its benefit. The alleged copying of SpaceX documents by Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev was certainly not helpful, either.
The question of how Putin gets out of the mess he has made for himself is a thorny one. The answer may be left to his successor.
In the meantime, the importance of SpaceX has grown beyond all expectations. The Crew Dragon is now the only vehicle capable of taking people to and from the space station. No additional means seem to be on the horizon, except possibly the Boeing Starliner, if it can be made to work.
As magnificently as SpaceX has performed, the fact remains that it is not unwise to rely on just one provider for services like human space flight. Some alternative must be developed. But where?
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has made headlines with its New Glenn and its soon-to-be-launched Blue Moon lunar lander. Perhaps the founder of Amazon will expand into the crewed spacecraft business.
India’s Gaganyaan is another possibility. Currently it has conducted parachute tests. After a series of uncrewed flights, the space capsule is scheduled to take astronauts to low Earth orbit in the first quarter of 2027.
Thus, India’s rise as a space power may be mirrored by Russia’s decline.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/opinion-russia-human-spaceflight-business-030000509.html
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