The Soviet space programme ran for decades without any central space agency
Sputnik, Gagarin and Mir all came from a system with no single agency in charge. Power sat with rival design bureaus and a council of chief designers. So when Boris Yeltsin created the Russian Space Agency on 25 February 1992, it was something genuinely new, and the old bureaus were in no hurry to obey it.
Its first director, Yuri Koptev, had designed Mars landers at NPO Lavochkin. He soon found how little authority the agency had. The decision to keep Mir flying past 1999 was taken not by the agency but by the shareholder board of the Energia design bureau, and the Angara rocket family owed more to the Khrunichev bureau's knack for attracting money than to any long-term plan.
Money was the other problem. Through the 1990s cash dried up, so the agency improvised, becoming a leader in commercial satellite launches and in space tourism while science missions shrank to a sliver. It still kept Mir, the first modular space station, going ten years beyond its design life, until the last crew left in 2000. That same year, on 31 October, a Soyuz carried NASA's Bill Shepherd with cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko to the International Space Station, beginning a human presence there that has never since been interrupted. Russia had launched the station's first module, Zarya, in 1998.
Reliability troubles later forced a shake-up. After a Proton rocket failed in July 2013, the government folded the industry into a single state corporation. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin complained that Russia employed about 250,000 people in the sector to achieve what the United States managed with 70,000. On 1 January 2016 the agency formally became a state corporation bearing the Roscosmos name.
Its Soyuz craft remain the most flown crewed spacecraft in history. Missions have been mixed: Mars 96 and Fobos-Grunt failed and the Luna 25 lander crashed in 2023, but the Trace Gas Orbiter, built with Europe, reached Mars orbit in 2016.
Source: Roscosmos
