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Russia’s newest rocket is reportedly set to launch before the end of the year. Dmitry Bakanov, the director of Roscosmos, Russia’s state space corporation, said in a recent interview that the country is on track to launch the Soyuz-5 launch vehicle this year.

“Yes, we are planning for December. Everything is in place,” Bakanov told Russian state-owned news agency TASS. The statement indicates that Russia is readying the Soyuz-5 for its first flight, which is expected to take off from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.

It will be the maiden flight of a rocket that Roscosmos has been working on for over a decade and is not expected to see full operational service until 2028. In the meantime, the Soyuz-5 is seen by Russia as a critical step forward in developing its space capabilities.

No New Design

Soyuz-5 (alternate name Irtysh) is not a new design but rather a domestic Soviet-era rocket that Roscosmos has adapted for modern use. As such, the rocket is in many ways a modern iteration of the Zenit-2 first developed in the 1980s by Yuzhnoye Design Bureau of Ukraine.

Zenit family of rockets, also built by Yuzhmash in Dnipro, Ukraine, flew from the late Soviet period all the way to the 2010s. The rocket used a powerful rocket engine called RD-171 made by Russian state design bureau NPO Energomash that provided more thrust than any other liquid fuel engine in service at the time.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian and Ukrainian governments shared the production of Zenit rockets, with Ukraine building the rocket stages and Russia building engines for those stages. This uneasy cooperation continued for years but eventually broke down completely after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Indeed, Russia bombed the former Zenit factory with a ballistic missile in late 2023, ending any hopes of a production restart and reconciliation. For Roscosmos, however, the invasion was a rude awakening to the fact that it would need to develop domestically-built alternatives to Zenit rockets.

As a result, Moscow has been investing in Soyuz-5, which was designed to supplant Zenit with a purely Russian-built rocket. Little has changed with Soyuz-5 in this respect. The booster largely inherits the Zenit-2 rocket design but with only minor modifications and upgrades.

Essentially, the rocket consists of a Zenit-2 whose main propellant tanks are slightly bigger. This means Soyuz-5 has a lift capacity of about 17 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, putting it in the same category as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and other medium-lift vehicles, except Soyuz-5 is an entirely expendable rocket.

Its most notable feature is its RD-171MV engine that is the most recent version of the NPO Energomash design that powered Energia rocket as well as the Zenit series. This engine, however, does not use any Ukrainian parts, meaning it is completely independent of any foreign vendors or suppliers.

Fueled by kerosene and liquid oxygen, the RD-171MV engine produces over three times the thrust of a Space Shuttle main engine, making it the most powerful in the world in terms of liquid-fueled engines.

Limited to the Heavens

For Russia, however, Soyuz-5 is more than just an updated version of Zenit. By phasing out Ukrainian-made rocket stages and Proton-M, a Soviet-era launch vehicle itself, Roscosmos has in the Soyuz-5 a means to ensure that it still has medium-lift launch vehicle capacity in its space arsenal despite the lack of foreign parts.

As to whether it is a “next-generation” rocket is another question, however, as Roscosmos appears to already be working on a “more modern” alternative to Soyuz-5 that will have reusable first stages and liquid oxygen-methane engines called Soyuz-7, or Amur. The real next-generation vehicle has been repeatedly delayed.

In the meantime, Soyuz-5 is more of a stopgap. A reliable, if conventional, expendable rocket that is capable of allowing the Russian space industry to maintain its composure as it grapples with sanctions, budget cuts, and increasing international isolation.

After all, one of the main questions about Soyuz-5 are its commercial prospects. The global launch market has changed significantly over the past decade, and with SpaceX making headlines in recent years with its reusability and low prices, an expendable rocket with roots in the Soviet era will have a tough time competing for international customers.

Russia continues to use the Soyuz-2 for crewed launches and its newer Angara series for medium- to heavy-lift payloads. But both those rocket families have struggled to sell in the global market, with neither having a significant slice of market share as they are effectively cheaper and more flexible.

A Decade in the Making

Soyuz-5 has been in development for more than a decade, and as such, this appears to be a critical moment in its long, rocky road to launch. If the vehicle can launch successfully this year, it will be a major achievement for Roscosmos, given that it was able to do it during wartime with extreme economic pressure on the Russian space industry.

On the other hand, given that it is essentially a Soviet-era design with only cosmetic changes to make it “modern,” Soyuz-5 may prove to be an international failure on the world market despite Roscosmos’s best efforts.

However, one major question remains: Can Soyuz-5 launch in December? It will be crucial to watch for updates on the development and testing of the rocket in the coming weeks as Roscosmos gears up for its launch in Kazakhstan.