Active Conflicts & News Megathread August 27, 2025

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[u/MilesLongthe3rd]

Another Russian company is in a dire financial situation, but not one I was expecting.

https://www.moscowtimes.eu/2025/08/27/zadel-proeden-situatsiya-kriticheskaya-razrabotavshee-vse-raketi-sssr-predpriyatie-roskosmosa-soobschilo-ofinansovom-krahe-a172832

"The backlog is gone, the situation is critical." Roscosmos enterprise that developed all the USSR's rockets has announced its financial collapse

RKK Energia, the parent enterprise of Roscosmos, founded by Sergei Korolev and which developed all the key Soviet launch vehicles, including Vostok and the still-flying Soyuz, is on the verge of collapse and may be closed. As reported by Gazeta, CEO Igor Maltsev announced this in a mailing to employees on the occasion of the enterprise's 79th anniversary. "The situation is critical: multimillion-dollar debts, interest on loans are eating up the budget, many processes are ineffective, a significant part of the team has lost motivation and a sense of shared responsibility," Maltsev said in his statement. "The groundwork laid by Sergei Pavlovich [Korolev] and developed by our chief designers - Mishin, Glushko, Semenov - has been exhausted by now," Maltsev states. He also writes that "all major projects <…> have missed deadlines" and calls on his colleagues to stop "lying to themselves and others" about the true state of affairs and to start "fighting for the enterprise."

Maltsev does not rule out "closing the corporation" due to "the inability to function normally" and pay salaries and calls on everyone to "discipline" and "coordinated action." He admits that "pulling the company out of the realm of miracles." Founded in 1946 and creating the first artificial Earth satellite, as well as Soviet stations that reached the Moon, Venus and Mars, RSC Energia has accumulated 10.5 billion rubles in net losses over the past 10 years. The company's total debt as of June 30, 2025, reached 168.4 billion rubles and has grown by 17%, or 25 billion rubles, since the beginning of the year. The crisis in the Russian space industry worsened after the start of the war, when Roscosmos fell under sanctions and lost almost all foreign customers.

By the end of 2024, it had carried out only 17 space launches, which was the minimum for Russia since the early 1960s - the era of Yuri Gagarin, when the USSR was the first to send a man into space. Russia is more than 8 times behind the United States, which launched 145 spacecraft into orbit, and four times behind China (68 launches), according to data from the Payloadspace portal. A quarter of a century ago, Russia held a leading position in orbital launches: Roscosmos carried out more than 30 launches per year, compared to 28 for the US, 12 for Europe, and 5 for China (according to data for 2000). But since then, the US has increased the number of launches by 5.2 times, and China by almost 14 times. As a result, Russia has fallen to third place among space powers and is barely ahead of New Zealand, which carried out 13 launches last year.

[u/roionsteroids → u/MilesLongthe3rd]

Energia is a tiny part of roscosmos these days, and doesn't even have a commercial business I think? They just design things for the state as only customer.

Wikipedia lists plans for an upcoming space station after the end of the ISS (which isn't super realistic to take on alone, but they made the plans for one anyway, might end up being a module of an international effort) and a super heavy launcher (also in low demand, for moon and beyond missions that don't exist yet, and likely won't appear anytime soon either).

By the end of 2024, it had carried out only 17 space launches, which was the minimum for Russia since the early 1960s

Objectively false, 2020, 2021 had fewer than 17 launches.

https://planet4589.org/space/stats/out/tab1a.txt

Not that the number is limited or even influenced much by Energia somehow?

What an odd article.