Angara rocket the forever delayed hope

If you’ve been following space news for the last decade, you’ve heard the name Angara. It’s the Russian rocket that was supposed to replace the Soviet-era workhorses, end reliance on foreign launch sites, and restore Moscow’s credibility in the commercial launch market. Instead, it’s become a running joke among launch-watchers—a symbol of a once-great space power that can’t get its act together. For casual space enthusiasts tracking Russia’s decline from glory, the Angara story is less about engineering and more about the agencies behind it: Roscosmos, its contractors, and the bureaucratic inertia that has turned a promising design into a perpetual “next year” project.

The Angara family was conceived in the 1990s, when Russia realized its main launch site, Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, was a political liability. Rent payments, Kazakh sovereignty disputes, and the risk of losing access entirely forced a rethink. The solution was a modular rocket built from universal rocket modules (URMs) that could be stacked in different configurations—light, medium, and heavy lift. It was a smart, flexible design, using clean-burning kerosene and liquid oxygen engines developed by the powerhouse design bureau NPO Energomash. The first launch was originally scheduled for 2005.

That didn’t happen. Instead, the program entered a cycle of delays, budget cuts, and redesigns that would make any US military procurement officer wince. The first test flight finally occurred in July 2014, launching a dummy payload from the newly built Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East. It worked. But that single success was followed by nothing. No operational launches. No commercial customers. No follow-through. The heavy-lift variant, the Angara A5, didn’t fly until December 2020. And even then, it took another two years before Roscosmos scheduled a second flight, which finally lifted off in April 2024. That’s four operational launches in a decade for a rocket that was supposed to handle everything from military satellites to crewed lunar missions.

Why the endless delays? The answer is rooted in the agencies that manage Russian spaceflight. Roscosmos, the state space corporation, is notoriously top-heavy and risk-averse. Under former director Dmitry Rogozin, the agency prioritized flashy but unrealistic projects—like a super-heavy rocket and a lunar base—while starving workhorse programs like Angara of consistent funding. When Western sanctions hit after 2014 and again in 2022, Russia lost access to imported electronics and precision manufacturing tools. The Angara program relies heavily on Ukrainian-built components, which became impossible to source after relations collapsed. Domestic alternatives exist, but they require qualification and testing, which adds years to an already glacial schedule.

Then there’s the production side. The Angara is built at the Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center in Moscow, a factory that still operates partly on Soviet-era tooling. Khrunichev has a reputation for quality, but also for inefficiency. The URMs are welded and machined to tight tolerances, but each single heavy-lift Angara A5 costs an estimated $100 million to produce—more than a Falcon 9 launch, which comes with reusability baked in. Roscosmos has tried to bring costs down by switching to automated welding and increasing production rates, but the factory can only manage two or three Angara cores per year. Commercial customers, who need reliability and competitive pricing, have long since turned to SpaceX, Arianespace, or even India’s ISRO.

The consequences of these agency failures are stark. While Russia’s space program once led the world—first satellite, first human, first space station—it now lags on every metric. The Angara was supposed to be the backbone of Russia’s independent launch capability, allowing flights from Russian soil without relying on Kazakhstan. Instead, the majority of Russian military and government launches still use the old Proton-M rocket, which flies from Baikonur and uses toxic hypergolic fuels that are banned in many countries. The Soyuz-2, a 1960s design, continues to handle crewed missions. When Russia needed to launch its Nauka science module to the ISS in 2021, it used a Proton, not an Angara. When it launched the Luna 25 lander in 2023, it used a Soyuz.

The Angara does have one bright spot: the Vostochny Cosmodrome, built specifically for this rocket, is modern and well-equipped. But a new launch site doesn’t fix an agency that can’t deliver hardware on time. In early 2025, Roscosmos announced that serial production of the Angara A5 would finally begin, with a goal of six to eight launches per year by 2026. Even if that timeline holds—and it probably won’t—the Angara will still be a niche player. The rocket is not reusable. It’s not cheap. It’s not flying anything critical that couldn’t fly on a Soyuz or Proton. Meanwhile, SpaceX is launching Starship test flights, China is launching its Long March 5, and Europe is prepping Ariane 6.

For American space enthusiasts in their 20s, the Angara is a case study in what happens when an agency loses its edge. Russia’s decline from glory isn’t about a lack of smart engineers—those still exist. It’s about a system that rewards delay over delivery, that prioritizes political theater over production, and that has spent twenty years building a rocket that still doesn’t fly regularly. The Angara is hope, forever delayed. And hope is not a launch manifest.