Roscosmos — first at almost everything

The Soviet answer to the Saturn V was the N1 — a 105-metre superbooster with thirty engines clustered at its base because Korolev and engine designer Valentin Glushko had stopped speaking to each other and Glushko refused to build anything larger.

To save money the Soviets never built a ground test stand to fire the full stage; each test was a flight. Between February 1969 and November 1972 four N1s left the pad. All four exploded. The second, on July 3 1969 — seventeen days before Apollo 11 — ingested a loose bolt into an oxidizer pump; the flight computer shut down the wrong engines; the rocket collapsed back onto its own launch complex in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history.

The program was quietly canceled in 1974. The Soviet government's official position was that there had never been a crewed Moon race — that the robotic Luna probes were always the plan. The surviving N1 hardware was cut up for scrap. Pieces became sheds and garages around Baikonur.

Having lost the Moon, the Soviets built the future everyone else eventually copied: permanent habitation in Earth orbit.

Salyut 1 launched in April 1971, the first space station of any kind. Six more Salyuts followed — several of them secretly military reconnaissance platforms flown under civilian cover. Then in February 1986, Mir: the first modular station, assembled in orbit over a decade from six pressurized modules, hosting a rotating international crew including cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who stayed aboard for a continuous 438 days — a record no one has broken.

The high frontier cost lives. In June 1971 the three-man Soyuz 11 crew — first residents of Salyut 1 — died on the way home when a pressure equalization valve popped open during descent-module separation. The cabin depressurized instantly, above the Kármán line. They remain the only human beings ever to die in space. The Soyuz spacecraft was completely redesigned. The one that emerged has flown for fifty years without another fatal accident.

Roscosmos in the 2020s is a program trying to rebuild sovereignty while running out of parts.

Baikonur — the historical spaceport — is on leased land in Kazakhstan. Many upper-stage components used to come from Ukraine. So Russia has spent two decades building an alternative: the Vostochny cosmodrome in the Amur Oblast, and the modular Angara rocket family with entirely Russian components. Vostochny's construction is one of the most scandal-ridden infrastructure projects in modern Russian history — over $165M embezzled, worker hunger strikes, dozens of convictions, and in November 2025 the electricity company disconnected parts of the still-under-construction site because the contractor had defaulted on its bills.

Meanwhile Russia's first lunar landing attempt in 47 years, Luna 25, ended in August 2023 when a maneuvering engine fired for 127 seconds instead of 84. The lander spun out and slammed into the inner rim of Pontécoulant G crater. Western sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine cut off Roscosmos from space-grade electronics; commercial launch revenue has collapsed because SpaceX now flies most of what used to fly on Soyuz. The new strategy is a partnership with China to build the International Lunar Research Station at the Moon's south pole — including a nuclear power plant, planned for the mid-2030s.