Russia’s Troubled Decade in Space

The 1990s were not a good time in the former Soviet Union. When the central government fell, it wasn’t just a political collapse, but a collapse of just about everything—the military, the economy, society itself. Ethnic tensions erupted into raging civil wars; rushed free-market reforms threw countless millions into poverty; amid political turmoil, President Boris Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on Russia’s own parliament. Yet somehow, despite all that chaos, the mighty Soviet space industry avoided the fate of the country that had built it. Russia kept sending up Soyuz rockets as if little had changed, and would enter the new millennium as a key contributor to the ISS.

What explains this curious survival? How did the Soviet legacy of exploration overcome such a devastating collapse? For today’s blog post, we will look into a turbulent ten years, during which technical resourcefulness and political maneuverings allowed Russia to rise from the ashes as a renewed space power.

The last hurrahs of the Soviet space program

After their failure in the Moon race, in which they denied having competed at all, the Soviets focused on Earth-orbiting stations. During the 1970s and 1980s, the US only put up one space station; the USSR, seven. Missions to the six Salyut stations refined techniques for docking, living in space, and conducting research under conditions of weightlessness. Soviet cosmonauts logged considerably more flight time than their American counterparts. These pioneering efforts culminated in Mir, launched in several pieces from 1986 onwards, which at the time was the largest and most complex craft ever put into orbit.

Another achievement of the late Soviet era was Buran, their answer to the Space Shuttle. Superficially, it looked almost identical to NASA’s design, but it carried a few tricks up its sleeve. Unlike the Space Shuttle, it was lifted into orbit atop a fully expendable carrier rocket¹ (as opposed to using its own engines), and it could fly to orbit and back without a crew, which it did on its sole test flight in 1988. A second flight had been planned for 1993; this was canceled when the Soviet economy ran into the gutter, and took funding with it.

Things fall apart

The Soviet Union ended with relatively little bloodshed. Almost all of the violence that did occur was ethnic in nature, particularly in the Caucasus and in Chechnya. Aside from a coup attempt in August 1991, halfhearted and more or less bloodless, the reigning Communist Party made little effort to hold on to power. Mikhail Gorbachev’s central government became impotent after the coup’s failure; it formally ceased to exist in December of that year, when Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine liquidated it by treaty. Gorbachev resigned² as President of the USSR soon after.

The Soviet collapse had several causes: a faltering economy, ethnic separatism, the sudden liberalization of politics, and above all, reckless mismanagement by Gorbachev. He may be admired in the West, but he is still reviled in his own country for running everything into the ground. It’s hard to blame the man’s detractors. Instead of building a democratic, market-oriented socialism, as he’d intended, his policies put an entire generation at the mercy of predatory oligarchs, while opening the door for the hyper-nationalistic authoritarianism we see in Russia today.

And what a mess he made! There are bound to be messes when a country suddenly fractures into fifteen independent nations. The fate of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal had to be sorted out, as did its considerable energy infrastructure, and the Russian minorities in republics like Ukraine and Estonia. Amid all those hot-button issues, the space program largely slid under the radar. But it, too, proved awkward to carve up.

The divorcees split their assets

Here’s a fact most people don’t know: if we’re getting technical about it, the Soviet Union never actually had a space program. There was no equivalent to NASA, JAXA, or any of the other acronym agencies. Rather, the country’s efforts in space fell to a diffuse constellation of design bureaus, headed by individual engineers who competed viciously against each other for resources. Sergei Korolev’s OKB-1 (now known as Energia) was the most famous of these, responsible for such triumphs of the Space Race as Sputnik and Vostok. Other prominent bureaus included those of Vladimir Chelomei and Mikhail Yangel. Some operated under the Ministry of Medium Machine-Building, while others were scattered haphazardly throughout the government apparatus.

As you can imagine, there was considerable uncertainty about what, exactly, existed to be transferred, and to whom. It didn’t help that Soviet space industries were spread throughout several newly independent states. Russia had the largest share, but Ukraine inherited a key rocket center in Dnipropetrovsk and a tracking station in Crimea. The thorniest issue, by far, was Baikonur Cosmodrome, the spaceport Russia needed to launch any but the smallest of rockets. It had been erected in 1955 within the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, and now lay inside Kazakhstan. Years of haggling followed; in 1994, Russia signed a treaty renting the spaceport for $115 million a year, renewing at the same (contentious) price in 2005.

A number of cosmonauts were orbiting aboard Mir when the Soviet Union dissolved. These included Sergei Krikalev, a Russian; Aleksandr Volkov, also a Russian; and Toktar Aubakirov, a Kazakh. They launched as Soviets, and landed, months later, as citizens of their own independent countries. With the landing sites also in Kazakhstan, there were legal uncertainties around the return home. Sergei Krikalev ended up stranded in space for 311 days.

Organizational hairballs

In February 1992, Boris Yeltsin tried to centralize space operations by establishing the Russian Space Agency (initialized as RKA in Russian), with Yuri Koptev appointed as director. The new agency got off to a rocky start. While RKA had the sole authority to grant civilian contracts on behalf of the government, the old design bureaus, now reconstituted as corporations, retained considerable power of their own. RKA only employed about 400 full-time administrators, engineers, and other staff; Energia, the largest of the space enterprises, positively dwarfed it in scale. The two butted heads throughout the early 1990s.

Space historian James Oberg recounted the clash in his 1995 exposé “Russia’s Space Program: Running on Empty,” published by SPECTRUM Magazine. According to Oberg, Energia sent its own ambassadors to visit commercial partners and foreign space agencies, bypassing RKA entirely. They claimed all deals would have to go through them. Energia, they said, was the “real Russian space program.”

RKA got the last laugh, though. Despite the efforts of Energia’s corporate ambassadors, the official space agency won all the high-profile Western contracts, putting Energia in a difficult spot financially. The company also shot itself in the foot by partially going private. In 1993 it allocated half of its stock to its own senior officials³, and half to the state; Moscow, seeing this, gave Energia only half of the budget it had previously enjoyed. Any issues of subordination were more or less sorted out from that point on.

Less money, more problems

Funding was the most urgent issue during those years. The Russian government had very little cash on hand, and it was selling off Soviet assets left and right just to stay solvent—including, most egregiously, an attack submarine that some Navy officers almost sold to a drug cartel. Even the military was in dire straits; next to that, the civilian space program received crumbs.

Rocket launches had fallen to an all-time low by 1995. Experienced staff were laid off in droves all across the space sector, often taking their talents abroad. In contrast to the 1980s, during which the Soviet Union had sent probes to Venus, Mars, and Halley’s Comet, the following decade saw only one interplanetary mission: Mars 96, which burned up catastrophically after failing to reach Earth orbit.

Nowhere was the state of decay better captured than at Baikonur Cosmodrome, still operated by the Russians. The cosmodrome, and its attached city, Leninsk, fell steeply into decrepitude after the Soviet collapse. Heating, electricity, and even drinking water all became unreliable; dire working conditions and miserable pay led many workers to abandon their jobs, forcing Baikonur to run with a skeleton crew, many of them old-timers who had been there since the Khrushchev days. When James Oberg interviewed some of them for his SPECTRUM article, none could name any new hires within the past five years.

The overall outlook was grim. RKA lacked the money to properly maintain its facilities, let alone launch any new endeavors. Perhaps Yeltsin could have cut his losses, withdrawing what little funding he gave the moribund space program, but he was in a bind–while Russia couldn’t afford to keep launching rockets, it couldn’t afford to stop, either. The Russians claimed to be the heirs of the great Soviet superpower. They could hardly maintain that image if they scuttled the Soviet Union’s proudest technological achievements. So Mir kept circling the Earth, serviced by regular flights of Soyuz and Progress ferry craft, and the Russian Space Agency just had to find a way to pay for it all.

Space for sale

The funding crisis had one upside: it bred innovation. Cash-strapped Russia became a pioneer in the commercialization of space, offering space tourism and satellite launches alongside other, wackier schemes. RKA sought foreign dollars with the eagerness of a dog begging at Thanksgiving dinner, as did industry titans such as Energia, who would sign contracts with anyone who promised investment.

A prelude to this was the flight of Toyohiro Akiyama, who visited Mir just prior to the collapse of the USSR. Akiyama was not a member of any space agency; he was a journalist from Tokyo Broadcasting Corporation, undertaking a commercially financed spaceflight, and he delivered the first news broadcast from Earth orbit. Accounts differ as to how much the Soviets charged for this privilege, but it may have been as high as $37 million.

There was also an attempt to privately fund the flight of a British citizen to space. This took place in 1991, just before the Soviet Union formally dissolved. Out of 13,000 applicants, chemist Helen Sharman was selected to fly to Mir on a Soyuz capsule, with various British businesses promising to pay the Soviets for her seat. Unfortunately, they failed to raise the necessary funds; Sharman’s flight would have been canceled if not for the intervention of Mikhail Gorbachev, who wanted the mission to go forward, at Soviet expense, in the name of international cooperation. She launched on May 18 aboard Soyuz TM-10, and landed eight days later with Mir‘s outgoing crew.

The next launches of tourists into space would take place in the early 2000s. In 1999, though, the Russians nearly sent British billionaire Peter Llewelyn to Mir, announcing that he had booked a flight for $100 million. The deal fell through when Llewelyn denied having ever agreed to pay that much. Russian media, in turn, accused him of being a con artist, a profiteer, and a “garbage king.” Mir had sorely needed his $100 million; by that point, the station was outright falling apart due to lack of funding.

While tourism was hit-and-miss, to say the least, it was in commercial launch systems that Russia found its real money-maker. RKA and private enterprises alike leveraged Soviet technology to attract international customers. Surplus Topol ballistic missiles, which were supposed to be disposed of by treaty, became launch vehicles for small satellites; warehoused rocket engines were sold to Aerojet for $1.1 million each. Russia lent its aerospace expertise to a range of ventures, including an ambitious scheme, Sea Launch, which launched satellites from floating platforms on Earth’s equator. Meanwhile, the workhorse Proton rocket, marketed by a joint venture between two Russian firms, Krunichev and Energia, and the American company Lockheed Martin, became one of the most prolific launchers of the 1990s. By the year 2000, Proton had brought in more than $1.5 billion worth of contracts.

Mir was not exempt from the commercialization craze. Towards the end of the decade, as it lost the spotlight to the planned ISS, there was talk of repurposing the aging station for commercial activities. Perhaps it could be a zero-g film studio, or a lab for industrial research. Tourism was a possibility, too, though few could afford the price tag. Many in Russia were not pleased with these proposals; they viewed it as selling out a key point of national pride. Nevertheless, RKA officially leased Mir to an Amsterdam-based consortium, MirCorp, in 2000, citing the deal as necessary to keep the station running at all. Russia had already committed to the ISS, and they couldn’t afford to maintain Mir as well.

In the event, MirCorp didn’t save the station. Large-scale commercial funding failed to materialize, and Mir re-entered Earth’s atmosphere over the South Pacific on March 23, 2001.

Shuttle-Mir: NASA throws a lifeline

One thing I have not mentioned is the role of NASA in all this. Frankly, it was the American space program that kept Mir running as long as it did. The 1990s saw one of space history’s most significant cooperative ventures, and a direct precursor to the ISS: the Shuttle-Mir project. Eleven Space Shuttle missions visited Mir between 1994 and 1998. American astronauts also flew aboard a Soyuz launch. This was not quite a collaboration between equals, though—beneath the surface, NASA was desperately trying to keep the Russian space program afloat.

Shuttle-Mir had a long history behind it. In 1975, the US and USSR had docked an Apollo spacecraft to a Soyuz for a famous handshake in space, marking a seismic shift away from the cutthroat competition of the Space Race. Around 1978 there were preliminary talks about docking a Space Shuttle to a Salyut station, though that fizzled out with the resumption of tensions. Throughout the 1980s, the rival powers planned their own separate, highly ambitious space stations—Mir for the Soviets, and Freedom for the Americans. Then the Soviet Union fell apart. With the end of the Cold War, cooperation was suddenly on the table again.

Both parties stood to gain from the joint construction of a space station. The math was simple enough: NASA had suffered budget cuts, so it couldn’t build Freedom alone, and the Russians were flat-out broke. In September 1993, the US and Russia agreed to build what would eventually become the ISS. Phase One of this project, establishing the infrastructure and experience for long-term cooperation, would be heavy US involvement in Mir. The US paid more than $325 million under the agreement. It also financed the last two modules for Mir, Spectr and Priroda, which were filled with NASA experiments.

Why was NASA so generous? The geopolitics behind this seem quite strange in retrospect. From 1945 to the late 1980s, the Russians were our foremost enemy. Since the 2000s they’ve been enemy #2, after China. But for a window in the 1990s, while Yeltsin was at the helm, Russia and the United States were something approaching allies. The White House considered it prudent to preserve that alliance by propping up Russia’s nearly bankrupt space program.

Shuttle-Mir generated significant controversy in its day, with Congress and the general public asking why it was in America’s interests to send astronauts to a decrepit Russian space station. Everyone knew NASA was forking over cash because the Russians couldn’t afford to run Mir themselves. Scandalous stories got out of Russian officials using NASA funds to build lavish mansions for themselves, and of involvement by the Russian mafia in the space program. There were also serious concerns about safety. In 1997, with US astronauts aboard, Mir suffered the one-two punch of a major fire and a collision with a resupply craft.

Despite all those issues, the Shuttle-Mir program ran to its planned conclusion in 1998. The Russians launched the first module of the ISS, Zarya, in November of that year, and it grew steadily from there. Mir, meanwhile, was allowed to deorbit soon after the turn of the millennium.

Into the new century

The construction of the ISS marked a distinct change in Russia’s space fortunes. Likewise, the country as a whole seemed to be on an upswing, particularly after the oil boom of 2006. There was money in the coffers again. The chaos of the post-Soviet years had, for the most part, come to an end, and Russia had re-established itself as a major player in space. For a time, it even had the satisfaction of being NASA’s only ride to orbit; after the 2011 retirement of the Space Shuttle, and before the 2020 introduction of Crew Dragon, Russia and China were the only countries in the world capable of crewed spaceflight.

But the story isn’t over, yet. The relative high point of the 2000s and 2010s has been followed by another period of crisis. Russia’s prestige hasn’t exactly been helped by the shoddy manufacturing that left three people stranded aboard the ISS, or the never-ending delays of its new capsule, Orel, which is supposed to replace the very old Soyuz. And of course, there is the ongoing war in Ukraine. With international partnerships dwindling, and both material and human resources sacrificed en masse to the Ukrainian meatgrinder, it’s anyone’s guess how much longer Russia can remain a major player in space.

That, though, is a story for another blog post.

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Thank you for reading this one, folks! These deep-dives are a lot of fun for me, and I hope you learned as much reading this one as I did writing it. I’ll catch you all next week with some more late Soviet troubles…

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1. Buran flew atop the Energia super-heavy booster, which remains one of the largest rockets ever built. Just like the Soviet space shuttle, Energia had a limited run, flying first in 1987 to launch the Polyus military station, and again in 1988 to launch Buran. ↩︎
2. After the signing of the Belovezha Accords, on December 8, there was an awkward three-week period in which Mikhail Gorbachev was the ultimate lame duck, holding on to his office as Soviet president despite the entire USSR having seceded from under his feet. Only on December 25 did he accept the inevitable and resign. ↩︎
3. Just one example of the corrupt privatization that defined Russia during this period. In the name of the free market, Soviet-appointed apparatchiks would free industries from the shackles of state control, and hand over ownership to… themselves. ↩︎