.

Russia is on track to launch its latest rocket, the Soyuz-5, before the end of this year. Dmitry Bakanov, the director of Roscosmos, said as much in a recent interview with state-run news agency TASS.

“Yes, we are planning for December,” he said, with preparations for the first liftoff being finalized. The launch pad is the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan. If all goes according to plan, this will be the maiden test flight of a rocket that has been more than 10 years in the making. Roscosmos has planned several trial launches, but it will likely be several years before the Soyuz-5 is in full operational service. This will likely come no earlier than 2028.

Soyuz-5, also known as Irtysh, is far from a clean sheet of paper. Roscosmos is building on the experience of the Zenit-2 rocket, an earlier rocket first designed in the 1980s by Ukraine’s Yuzhnoye Design Bureau. Zenit rockets were assembled in Ukraine and were equipped with Russia’s RD-171 engines. The project was an important post-Soviet example of Russian-Ukrainian cooperation in aerospace. This partnership ended with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. By the end of 2023, the Russian military had even struck the Ukrainian plant that had once assembled Zenit.

Soyuz-5 is, in essence, a larger and domestically produced Zenit. The redesign removed Ukrainian involvement by ensuring that all core parts are manufactured in Russia. For Moscow, that alone is a major win, ending years of reliance on a partner that has suddenly become an enemy and simultaneously replacing the decades-old Proton-M launcher.

A Transitional Design

Soyuz-5, from a purely technical perspective, falls into the medium-lift class. Its payload is around 17 metric tons to low-Earth orbit (LEO). This is made possible by slightly enlarged propellant tanks on Zenit. But at the center of the rocket is the RD-171MV engine, the latest iteration of a long line of powerplants.

Its design dates back to Energia, a 1980s rocket program that powered the Soviet space shuttle Buran. The current RD-171MV has one significant feature: it has no Ukrainian parts. This engine, powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen, produces over 3.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. That makes it nearly three times as powerful as NASA’s Space Shuttle main engine, and it is currently the most powerful liquid-fueled rocket engine in service.

For all that power, Soyuz-5 itself is not reusable. In contrast, many new designs, most notably SpaceX’s Falcon 9, are being built around the idea of reusability. That development may be the biggest question mark on whether Soyuz-5 can attract a significant share of the international launch market.

The rocket, however, still serves an important purpose for Roscosmos. With a limited budget thanks to war spending and international sanctions, it has proven hard to develop a brand-new, fully reusable rocket. The Amur project, also called Soyuz-7, was intended to do just that. It is still on paper, designed to have a reusable first stage and methane-fueled rocket engines. A fully operational Amur could one day offer launch services at prices to compete with SpaceX. But technical challenges and organizational issues have pushed back its development timeline. Instead of flying in 2025, Amur is now not expected before 2030.

That leaves Soyuz-5 as a transitional design. It keeps Russia’s space program marching forward, even if it is not with the latest technology. Instead, Soyuz-5 is very much a vehicle rooted in the Soviet past.

The commercial prospects for the Soyuz-5 are less clear. The launch market has changed profoundly in the last decade, with companies like SpaceX and, to a lesser degree, Chinese providers offering cheaper and more flexible services. Russia is still operating its Soyuz-2 rockets for crewed flights and the Angara family for heavier payloads, but neither has carved out a major niche in the international market. It is an open question if Soyuz-5 can buck that trend.

At the same time, the fact that Roscosmos has managed to get Soyuz-5 ready for launch under challenging circumstances is a success story on its own. A successful December flight would show that Russia, despite sanctions and a tight budget, can still bring new hardware to the launch pad.

Soyuz-5, in the end, will not change the way people design rockets. For Russia, however, it has political and industrial importance. It is a step toward technological independence from former partners. It is also a bridge to the future, toward what comes next, be that Amur or another entirely new generation of rockets still on the drawing board.