Ukraine Just Exposed The RUSSIAN Space Failure
For three years, Vladimir Putin has tried to keep one particular embarrassment out of public view: a national space program that has quietly collapsed into one of the least productive in the world, even as the Kremlin poured more than a billion dollars into a rushed attempt to build its own version of Starlink. Last month, Ukraine made that failure impossible to hide — first by striking the factory that builds the rockets carrying Russia’s satellites into orbit, and then by watching, in near real time, as an entire batch of those satellites simply refused to climb to where they were supposed to go.
On August 15, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine’s long-range Flamingo missiles had struck the Progress Rocket Space Center in Samara, the plant responsible for building the Soyuz-2 and Soyuz-5 rockets that Russia depends on to launch its satellites. It’s a facility that can’t be relocated, hardened overnight, or replaced — a fixed, irreplaceable node in Russia’s already thin space infrastructure, and Ukraine hit it directly. Two weeks later, the consequences of Russia’s broader satellite gamble became painfully visible on their own, when the Institute for the Study of War reported that an entire batch of 16 satellites launched in July had failed to reach their intended orbit. Put those two developments together, and what gets exposed isn’t a single bad launch. It’s a space program that has been quietly falling apart for years, one that Russia is now trying to patch together under wartime pressure, with a factory that Ukraine has proven it can reach.
A Constellation Falling Out of the Sky
The satellites in question belong to Rassvet, Russia’s attempt to build a homegrown replacement for SpaceX’s Starlink network — a program that became urgent for Moscow after Ukraine persuaded SpaceX to shut down the informal Starlink terminals Russian forces had been using on the battlefield. Coverage from The New Voice of Ukraine reported that a second batch of Rassvet satellites, launched on July 19, all failed to reach the altitude needed for operation, according to the Institute for the Study of War. The spacecraft were supposed to reach an operational altitude of roughly 550 kilometers, but as of the end of August, most had ended up sitting far lower, between 300 and 400 kilometers, with at least two on a trajectory toward reentry into the atmosphere.
That’s a serious setback, but it isn’t Russia’s first with this program. Of the 32 Rassvet satellites Russia has launched in 2026, only 12 — all from the first batch, launched in March — actually reached a sustainable operational altitude, where they now provide Russian forces with two daily connectivity windows over Ukraine totaling up to 90 minutes. The July batch, by contrast, batted zero. The Institute for the Study of War concluded that the apparent failure of the entire second batch to reach its target altitude suggests Russia simply wasn’t ready to accelerate deployment of the constellation at the pace it needed to.
The physics of the failure compound the problem over time. Satellites parked at lower-than-intended altitudes face far greater atmospheric drag, which forces them to burn fuel simply to hold position rather than to maneuver where they’re needed — fuel they were never budgeted to spend that early in their operational lives. Left uncorrected, that drag either drags a satellite into a slow death spiral toward reentry, as appears to be happening to at least two of the July satellites, or shortens what would otherwise be years of usable service into a fraction of that span.
A Program Built on a Deadline It Can’t Meet
Rassvet is being developed by Bureau 1440, a private Russian aerospace firm that has reportedly received on the order of $1.28 billion from the Kremlin, with a stated ambition of getting 250 satellites operational by 2027 and 900 in orbit by 2035. Even before the July failures, that timeline looked aggressive. After them, it looks close to fantasy. The Institute for the Study of War noted that Russia’s plans are constrained by its dependence on the Soyuz-2.1b, a costly and scarce launch vehicle, and that Russia has managed only six to eight launches of that rocket across all state and commercial missions since 2022. At that launch cadence, ISW estimated Russia could put no more than about 128 Rassvet satellites into orbit over four years — well short of even the 2027 target — with no guarantee that all, or even a workable minimum, would actually become operational once launched.
None of this makes Rassvet irrelevant on the battlefield, and that’s precisely why its failures matter beyond the technical details. A functioning Rassvet constellation would extend Russia’s ability to direct strikes over greater distances and with greater precision, and analysts have warned that the program’s repeated failures matter well beyond the engineering setbacks involved. Even the partially working constellation Russia has managed to cobble together, drawing on the dozen satellites that did reach altitude in March, is enough to give Russian forces intermittent windows to guide drones and long-range weapons with more precision than they’d otherwise have. Ukraine isn’t just watching Russia fail; it’s actively working to make sure the failure gets worse. The strike on the Progress plant in Samara was a direct attempt to choke off Russia’s ability to keep launching Soyuz rockets at all, since virtually all of Russia’s Soyuz-2 and Soyuz-5 production runs through that single facility.
Decades of Neglect Catching Up at Once
The deeper story behind Rassvet’s failures has less to do with any one botched launch and more to do with a Russian space program that has been starved of investment, talent, and priority for years. In April, Lev Zeleny, the scientific director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Institute, told the Russian Space Forum that the country had essentially no notable space projects underway beyond a planned orbital station, and acknowledged that Russia had fallen well behind its rivals. The launch statistics back him up: Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, conducted just 17 orbital launches in 2025 — a figure matched by New Zealand, a country with no domestic launch industry to speak of a decade ago. The United States conducted 181 orbital launches that year; China conducted 91. Russia’s current launch cadence is its lowest since 1961, the year the Soviet Union first put a human being into orbit.
That decline is now colliding with a wartime budget that has no room to reverse it. Russia has reportedly cut funding to several of its flagship “technological leadership” programs to save roughly $2.6 billion, funneling most of the savings toward the war effort — with drone development the only program to receive its full promised funding and then some. Space technology took one of the largest hits, losing roughly $129 million even as Rassvet absorbs over a billion dollars in a separate, urgent line item. Non-military government spending overall has reportedly been cut by 35 percent, and federal staffing by 15 percent, as Moscow grapples with a budget deficit estimated above $65 billion. In other words, the money the Kremlin is throwing at Rassvet isn’t new investment — it’s an attempt to buy back, in a matter of months, capability that decades of neglect quietly gave away.
A Race Russia Cannot Win on Its Own Terms
There’s a reasonable comparison to be made here, and it’s not flattering to Moscow. SpaceX’s own early Starlink satellites failed at meaningful rates too — roughly 5 percent of its first prototype batch failed outright, with the broader failure rate for that early generation running as high as 13 percent before engineering improvements brought it down to a fraction of a percent in later versions. Failure, in other words, is a normal part of building any satellite constellation. What isn’t normal is trying to compress a process that took SpaceX years of iteration, tens of billions of dollars, and a mature domestic launch industry into a fraction of that time, on a fraction of that budget, using a launch vehicle Russia can only fly a handful of times a year — all while an adversary is actively bombing the factory that builds the rockets.
That is the situation Russia finds itself in now, and it’s one almost entirely of its own making. Losing access to Starlink after years of relying on it left the Russian military scrambling for a fallback it had never seriously built. Rushing that fallback into existence produced satellites that can’t reach the altitude they need. And underpinning all of it is a space program that has been quietly deprioritized for so long that its own senior scientists are now warning, in public, that Russia is falling behind. Ukraine didn’t create any of those underlying problems. But with a single strike on a rocket factory in Samara, and with satellites failing to climb fast enough for the world to notice on its own, Ukraine has made sure nobody can pretend those problems don’t exist.
