THE NEW SPACE RACE: Russia has a plan to ‘restore’ its dominant position in the global launch market.

It has been a terrible decade for the Russian launch industry, which once led the world. The country’s long-running workhorse, the Proton rocket, ran into reliability issues and will soon be retired. Russia’s next-generation rocket, Angara, is fully expendable and still flying dummy payloads on test flights a decade after its debut. And the ever-reliable Soyuz vehicle lost access to lucrative Western markets after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Yet there has been a more fundamental, underlying disease pushing the once-vaunted Russian launch industry toward irrelevance. The country has largely relied on decades-old technology in a time of serious innovation within the launch industry. So what worked at the turn of the century to attract the launches of commercial satellites no longer does against the rising tide of competition from SpaceX, as well as other players in India and China.

Through the first quarter of this year, Russia has launched a total of five rockets, all variants of the Soyuz vehicle. SpaceX alone has launched 32 rockets. China, too, has launched nearly three times as many boosters as Russia.

However, Russia has a plan to reclaim the dominance it once held in the global launch industry. In a recent interview published on the Roscosmos website (a non-geo-blocked version is available here) the chief of the Russian space corporation, Yuri Borisov, outlined the strategy by which the country will do so.

The first step, Borisov said, is to develop a partially reusable replacement for the Soyuz rocket, called Amur-CNG. The country’s spaceflight enterprise is also working on “ultralight” boosters that will incorporate an element of reusability.

“I hope that by the 2028–2029 timeframe we will have a completely new fleet of space vehicles and will be able to restore our position in the global launch services market,” Borisov said in the interview

A completely new fleet within five years? Not gonna happen.

Plus: “This may all play well with a domestic audience in Russia, but let’s be real. Russia’s launch industry is a pariah in the West, and the country is likely a decade away from deploying a vehicle that might be competitive with the Falcon 9.”

SpaceX is less than a decade away — probably a lot less — from making the Falcon 9 obsolete.