Russia was supposed to have a new space station by now. Or at least a credible plan for one. Instead, the country that once defined the frontier of human spaceflight is watching its aging orbital infrastructure deteriorate while its replacement program stumbles through delays, budget shortfalls, and the compounding consequences of geopolitical isolation.
The International Space Station — that improbable joint venture between Cold War rivals — is scheduled for retirement around 2030. For NASA, that timeline is tight but manageable. For Roscosmos, Russia’s state space agency, it’s a cliff edge.
A Station Held Together by Duct Tape and Determination
The Russian segment of the ISS has been showing its age for years. Air leaks in the Zvezda service module’s transfer tunnel have been a persistent headache since at least 2019, with crews routinely patching cracks and monitoring pressure drops. According to BBC News, the situation has grown serious enough that NASA and Roscosmos have had to coordinate contingency planning around the possibility of isolating or even abandoning portions of the Russian segment.
The leaks aren’t catastrophic. Not yet. But they are symptomatic of a broader problem: Russia’s modules are the oldest components on the station, with Zarya and Zvezda both launched in 1998 and 2000 respectively. They were engineered for a 15-year operational life. They’ve now been in orbit for roughly 25 years, enduring thermal cycling, micrometeorite impacts, and the general hostility of low Earth orbit.
Russian cosmonauts have applied sealant, used patches, and even resorted to tea leaves to trace the source of leaks — a troubleshooting method that sounds almost folkloric but reflects the practical ingenuity that has long characterized Russia’s human spaceflight operations. The problem is that ingenuity has limits when the underlying hardware is degrading.
NASA officials have publicly maintained a diplomatic posture, emphasizing cooperation and joint problem-solving. Privately, the concern is more pointed. A February 2024 report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General flagged the Russian segment’s air leaks as one of the top risks to continued ISS operations. The report noted that the root cause of the leaks in the PrK module remained unresolved despite years of investigation.
And the station keeps getting older every day.
Russia’s answer to the ISS retirement is the Russian Orbital Service Station, known by its Russian acronym ROSS. Announced with some fanfare, ROSS is intended to be a sovereign Russian station in a higher-inclination orbit that would provide better coverage of Russian territory — a priority that reflects Moscow’s increasing emphasis on national security applications in space. The first module was originally projected for launch as early as 2027. That timeline has slipped. Repeatedly.
Funding is the most obvious constraint. Russia’s federal space budget has been squeezed by the war in Ukraine, Western sanctions, and the broader reorientation of state spending toward defense. Roscosmos received approximately 210 billion rubles (roughly $2.3 billion) in the 2024 federal budget — a figure that sounds substantial until you consider that NASA’s budget for the same year was approximately $25.4 billion. Building a new space station from scratch is extraordinarily expensive, and Russia is attempting to do it with a fraction of the resources available to its American counterpart.
Sanctions have compounded the financial strain. Russia’s space industry relied on Western-sourced electronics, components, and in some cases design software. The post-2022 sanctions regime has forced Roscosmos and its contractors to seek alternatives — often from China or through domestic substitution programs that are still maturing. The result is delays, quality concerns, and a supply chain that is far less reliable than what existed before the invasion of Ukraine.
There’s also a talent problem. Russia’s aerospace workforce has been aging for decades, and the combination of low salaries, brain drain to the private sector (or abroad), and reduced prestige has thinned the ranks of experienced engineers. The Soviet-era generation that built Mir and the ISS modules is retiring or gone. Their replacements are fewer and, in many cases, less experienced with the specific challenges of human-rated spacecraft.
The Geopolitical Dimension: From Partner to Outsider
For three decades, the ISS served as perhaps the most successful example of sustained international cooperation in history. American astronauts launched on Russian Soyuz rockets. Russian cosmonauts worked alongside NASA crews. Even during the lowest points of U.S.-Russia relations — the annexation of Crimea in 2014, election interference allegations, Syria — the ISS partnership held.
That partnership is now winding down, and nothing comparable is replacing it.
Russia has signaled interest in cooperating with China on its Tiangong space station, and broader collaboration under the International Lunar Research Station framework. But the relationship is asymmetric. China doesn’t need Russia the way Russia needs China. Beijing has demonstrated a fully independent human spaceflight capability, a functional space station, and a lunar exploration program that is hitting its milestones. Russia brings experience and legacy expertise, but its bargaining position weakens with each passing year of stagnation.
The dynamic is a reversal of the 1990s, when a cash-strapped Russia was invited into the ISS program partly to keep its rocket scientists employed and prevent proliferation of missile technology. Now Russia faces a similar brain-drain risk, but this time there’s no Western partnership to provide a financial lifeline.
Meanwhile, the commercial space station sector is accelerating. Axiom Space is building modules that are already attached to the ISS and will eventually detach to form an independent station. Vast Space, Blue Origin (through its Orbital Reef project), and other companies are developing commercial stations with NASA support through the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations program. NASA has committed up to $3.9 billion in total to support these efforts.
None of these commercial stations will include Russian hardware or Russian partnerships. Russia is being written out of the next chapter of low Earth orbit operations — not through any single dramatic decision, but through the accumulated weight of sanctions, budget constraints, and strategic divergence.
The implications extend beyond prestige. Continuous human presence in orbit provides practical benefits: materials science research, biological experiments in microgravity, Earth observation, and the maintenance of operational expertise in human spaceflight. If Russia loses access to a crewed orbital platform — even temporarily — it risks a gap in capability that could take a decade or more to recover from. The Soviet Union built Mir in the 1980s, but that was a different country with a different industrial base and a different set of priorities.
Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft remains one of the most reliable crew vehicles ever built. Its rocket engines, particularly the RD-180 family, were until recently purchased by the United States for Atlas V launches. But reliability in legacy systems doesn’t translate automatically into the ability to build new ones. And the commercial market for Russian launch services has cratered. European customers left after 2022. Many satellite operators have shifted to SpaceX or emerging providers.
So where does that leave ROSS?
Officially, on track. Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov has repeatedly affirmed the program’s importance and insisted that development is proceeding. But the agency’s track record on major new programs in recent years inspires limited confidence. The Vostochny Cosmodrome, Russia’s new launch facility in the Far East, was plagued by corruption, construction delays, and cost overruns. The Angara rocket family, intended to replace the aging Proton, has been in development for over two decades and has conducted only a handful of flights.
A pattern emerges. Ambitious announcements. Gradual timeline slippage. Quiet scope reductions.
ROSS, as currently described, would start with a smaller configuration than originally planned — perhaps just two or three modules initially, with expansion over time. That’s a pragmatic adjustment, but it also means the station would offer limited capability in its early years, potentially not enough to justify the cost of maintaining a continuous crew presence.
What Comes After the ISS
The 2030 deadline looms. NASA plans to use a SpaceX-built deorbit vehicle to guide the ISS into a controlled reentry over the Pacific Ocean. The technical planning for that end-of-life scenario is well advanced. But the political and operational questions surrounding the transition are far from settled.
Will Russia have an independent station operational by then? Almost certainly not, based on current trajectories. Will it have secured a berth on China’s Tiangong? Possible, but not guaranteed — and accepting a junior-partner role on a Chinese station would represent a dramatic comedown for a nation that once led the world in space station design and operation.
The most likely scenario is a gap. A period of years in which Russia has no permanent crewed presence in orbit. That would be a first since 1986, when Mir was launched. Nearly four decades of continuous Russian orbital operations, ending not with a bang but with a budget spreadsheet.
For the broader space community, Russia’s decline as a spacefaring power is not something to celebrate. Redundancy matters. Competition drives innovation. And the loss of institutional knowledge — the hard-won understanding of how to keep humans alive and productive in space — is a loss for everyone, regardless of geopolitics.
But sentiment doesn’t build space stations. Money does. Engineering talent does. Reliable supply chains do. And on all three counts, Russia is moving in the wrong direction.
The country that put the first human in orbit, that built the first modular space station, that kept the ISS alive during the years when the U.S. had no independent crew launch capability — that country is now struggling to plan its next move. The clock is ticking, the hardware is aging, and the leaks, both literal and figurative, aren’t getting any smaller.
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