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The Soyuz TMA-19M rocket launches into space from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome on Dec. 15, 2015.
NASA/Joel Kowsky | Getty Images
Smartphone enthusiasts can pick up fresh gear nearly every year — rocket aficionados usually face a longer wait.
For watchers of Russia-made launch vehicles, the clock’s now ticking down until December, when Moscow-headquartered state space agency Roscosmos still intends to carry out its first test launch of the Soyuz-5 rocket.
“Yes, we have plans for December, everything remains in force,” the Roscosmos Head Dmitry Bakanov said Aug. 22, according to Russian state news agency Tass.
The rocket, which is expected to become fully operational in 2028, is unlikely to shock by way of novelty. A decade in the making under the development name “Feniks” and popularly known as Irtysh, the Soyuz-5 is widely viewed as a medium-class launch vehicle that reincarnates the Ukraine-manufactured Zenit-2 rocket.
Moscow plans for the all-Russian Soyuz-5 to be the latest member of Russia’s workhorse Soyuz rocket family. It will be equipped with RD-171MV engines built by NPO Energomash, which former Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin praised as having “no equals in the world in terms of power” back in 2019. Powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen, the Soyuz-5 will be able to balance a roughly 17-ton payload.
If it meets the December deadline, the Soyuz-5 test launch will be no small feat for Roscosmos, which has faced funding shortages since the February 2022 start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The space agency had lost 180 billion rubles ($2.24 billion) by August 2024 and planned to put up non-core assets worth more than 11.4 billion rubles up for sale to shore up its activities.
The war in Ukraine marked a turning point for Russia’s space sector. The European Space Agency severed ties with Roscosmos in 2022, ending the two institutions’ partnership over the ExoMars rover mission and further lunar ventures. The breaking of ties also initially raised question marks over Moscow’s continued cooperation to maintain the International Space Station. Critically for the Soyuz line, the dissolution of this relationship also saw Roscosmos pull out from the ESA space center in Kourou, French Guiana — the pad for 27 Soyuz launches, which carried the likes of OneWeb and Galileo satellites between 2011-2022.
Since then, Roscosmos has switched gears and is looking to launch the Soyuz-5 from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome, which Astana is trying to leverage to kick start its own space industry and attract foreign operators and investment. The Russian space agency, which has been using the Baikonur facility since shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is paying Kazakhstan $115 million annually to lease the complex until 2050.
Getting a new rocket model to the launch pad and off the ground is no easy feat. The heavily mediatized successes and explosive failures of SpaceX’s test flights of its giant Starship — which pulled off a successful 10th trial launch this week, after a series of fiery setbacks earlier in the year — show as much. Chinese firm Landspace is also targeting an orbital debut for the Zhuque-3 by the end of the year.
Russia itself test launched its first post-Soviet era rocket model, the Angara-A5, in June last year, following two aborted launch attempts. But as the space industry increasingly progresses toward more cost-effective reusable rockets, the real test for Russian innovation will come once Moscow completes development of the Soyuz-7, known as the Amur-SPG — a methane-fueled launch vehicle, intended as a more cost-effective substitute to Russia’s workhorse rocket Soyuz-2. Its first stage is designed to be reused up to 50 times. As of January, Roscosmos is expected to finalize the rocket by 2030, with its launch site under construction at Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome.
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