Russia, as a whole, is in an irreversible demographic death spiral. A century hence, it will have a smaller population than present-day Germany or France.

The effective death of its space program will come long before the formal demise of Russia as a nation-state, though. Russia’s once large commercial launch business is all but gone and, once ISS is shut down, its human space program will have no destination. Satellite launches for various organs of the Russian state will continue on existing rockets, but no new vehicles are going to appear. Russia’s space program will be limited to no more than maintenance of existing Earth-orbit constellations as soon as the mid-2020’s.

The chart also shows that so far in 2018 Russia owns only 1/12 of the commercial market, SpaceX almost 2/3, and the rest (just over 1/4) to Arianespace. This is a dramatic change in less than a decade.

Of course, there are other launches (military and civil), but they tend to be driven by political or national motives. Commercial launches tend to show how well a rocket or company performs (price, availability, quality/reliability). As space becomes more commercialized, these performance factors become more important, as they determine how quickly a company can get itself started or expanded in its niche.

SpaceX has done well in its performance and seems to have found a way to develop rockets and spacecraft quickly without breaking the bank (11 years from founding to first commercial launch). Few others have managed to do this, Rocket Lab (12 years, if the next launch is successful as its first commercial launch) and Orbital Sciences (8 years) being the only companies that come to mind. Jordi Puig-Suari’s and Bob Twiggs’s cubesat concept is the satellite equivalent of fast and cheap, mainly due to standardization.

So where did Russia go wrong?

I would say that it was when they decided to get away from competition and entrepreneurship by consolidating its space industry under a central governmental control. Even Arianespace, which has a similar centralized-government-control problem, was able to make some adaptations to SpaceX’s competition.

This latest Russian development is yet another example of capitalism in space, as it shows that a socialized space program fails just as does any socialized economic system, but a free market capitalist space company can excel due to competition and entrepreneurship.