Russia Scales Back Ambitions for Its Next Space StationNEWS | 30 December 2025The International Space Station (ISS) is due to close down by 2030, and Russia, one of its main partners, is designing its own replacement orbital laboratory. After a decade of planning to place its future space station into a high-latitude polar orbit for Arctic observation, Russian authorities have changed their minds. Instead the Russians have decided to stick with the familiar ISS orbit—the same 51.6-degree inclination used by the Soviet Mir space station nearly 40 years ago.
The decision goes beyond a routine adjustment to flight plans. It will shape the architecture of Russia’s space program for decades to come, determining the type of modules used to build the Russian Orbital Station (ROS), the launch vehicles and spaceports that will be used, and the structure of the country’s future space economy. Roscosmos officials did not respond to a request for comment.
The head of Roscosmos framed the shift as a step toward future space cooperation with India. “We are building our own national orbital station, and India is building its own,” Roscosmos general director Dmitry Bakanov said during a visit to New Delhi, according to Russian news source RBC. India has announced plans to launch the first part of its Bharatiya Antariksh Station in 2028. “We are negotiating to place them in the same orbital plane.”
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Experts, however, are skeptical that alignment with India played more than a rhetorical role. “This decision is entirely understandable given the political and economic realities, says Dmitry Payson, a member of the International Academy of Astronautics, who was formerly associated with the Russian space sector. Placing the future station in the same orbit as the ISS is far less expensive, and requires fewer manufacturing and design innovations, than aiming for a polar orbit. “Compatibility with India in terms of inclination became a conveniently timed additional justification for a decision driven by different considerations,” Payson says.
Sticking with the same orbit will allow Roscosmos to reuse designs and technology from ISS and its existing Soyuz spacecraft, he adds. The result is a station architecture that looks less like a step forward than a return nearly 40 years back to the Mir era.
A polar orbit that passes over both of Earth’s poles remains a rarity in human spaceflight. So far, the only crewed mission to reach such an orbit was the privately funded Fram2 flight on the SpaceX Dragon capsule in April 2025.
In December 2014 Oleg Ostapenko, then head of Roscosmos, said the agency was considering a high-latitude station that would allow observation of most of Russia’s territory and could potentially serve as a staging ground for future lunar missions.
Early concepts also envisioned a suite of novel components, including the OKA-T autonomous module for ultrasensitive materials science experiments and an expandable module—Russia’s counterpart to the ISS’s BEAM—equipped with a centrifuge. The station was repeatedly described as a test bed for prospective elements of lunar infrastructure.
By 2021 much of that future-facing vision had faded. Officials decided to orient the station around the Science Power Module (NEM), whose hull was already sitting on the factory floor of Russian aerospace manufacturer RKK Energia. Originally planned for the ISS to reduce the Russian segment’s dependence on U.S. power, but still incomplete, NEM was a problematic choice as the core of an independent station.
The module lacked control moment gyros for attitude control and had only a single docking port, leaving no place for a cargo spacecraft to attach while a crew was on board. Additional docking hardware and follow-on modules would have to be sent up before even a minimal crew could visit.
The module would also have needed extensive reworking, including the addition of basic crew systems such as a toilet and a main computer, to turn what was essentially a power plant and laboratory into a functional control center and living space.
Launch plans only compounded the problem. NEM was to be sent into a polar orbit aboard the Angara-A5M rocket—a variant that has yet to fly—from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, which at the time lacked a launch pad for Angara.
These constraints ultimately pushed the polar orbit station project to a dead end, says military and space analyst Pavel Luzin, a senior fellow at the Saratoga Foundation. “NEM appears impossible to redesign into the core of a future station,” Luzin says. “Even if basic crew systems can be added, there would be little room left for scientific payloads—it would essentially become an enlarged spacecraft.”
The switch to a 51.6-degree orbit resolved many of the project’s challenges. The new station gets a starter module for free—one of the components of the Russian segment of ISS, called the MLM Nauka module, which is already in orbit and fully equipped for a crew. And there would be no need to upgrade the Vostochny launch pad because crewed launches could rely on proven Soyuz spacecraft from the fully equipped Baikonur Cosmodrome. NEM would retain its original role as a science-and-power module and could be launched aboard the reliable Proton-M rocket.
Plans to deploy the rest of the station are detailed in internal RKK Energia documents obtained by Scientific American. The sequence begins with the controlled deorbit of the “UM” docking and utility node module from Nauka. In late 2028 a nearly identical Universal Node Module (UUM) will be launched from Baikonur and attached to Nauka. At the same time, the ISS will be gradually lowering its orbit for its planned crash into the Pacific Ocean.
In 2029 NEM will be launched aboard a Proton rocket from Baikonur and docked to the UUM’s lower port. An airlock module, ShM, will follow in 2030, attaching to the side port.
Once assembled, the ROS will detach from the rest of ISS, which will have served as a building berth for its Russian “successor.” The new Russian station will then fly independently, with its attitude and orbit controlled by two specially modified Progress cargo spacecraft docked for that purpose.
Even these streamlined plans, however, will require substantial work to make the ROS operate independently. The relatively new Nauka module, launched in 2021, already needs repairs, including a fix to its leaking cooling system. All tasks must be completed before June 2030, when the ISS is expected to begin a rapid descent. There may be a gap before Russian cosmonauts can visit the new station.
“I believe Russia faces, at the very least, a hiatus in its crewed spaceflight program,” Luzin says. “Although it has long sought partners to join the ROS project, no visible progress has been made.”Author: Clara Moskowitz. Ilya Ferapontov. Source
