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Russia will attempt to launch its new rocket Soyuz-5 this year, Roscosmos head Dmitry Bakanov announced in an interview with state news agency TASS.

“Yes, we are planning for December,” Bakanov said. “The preparatory phase is already coming to an end.” Soyuz-5 will lift off from Baikonur, a cosmodrome in Kazakhstan leased from the government of Kazakhstan. The launch will mark the debut test flight of a rocket whose development has stretched for more than a decade. Roscosmos plans several demonstration launches before the vehicle enters service; 2028 is a tentative target.

The Soyuz-5 rocket, which is also known as Irtysh, is no radical departure. In fact, the vehicle borrows most of its design from Zenit-2, a rocket that first flew in the 1980s. Zenit was produced in Ukraine by a design bureau named Yuzhnoye, but they were powered by Russian-made RD-171 engines. Zenits were one of the few rocket programs that involved cooperation between Ukraine and Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But that cooperation was severed in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In fact, Roscosmos attacked and destroyed the Ukrainian plant where Zenits were assembled by late 2023.

Roscosmos is now redeveloping the Zenit as Soyuz-5. The updated rocket is a scaled-up version that is almost entirely built in Russia. The Zenit’s absence from Soyuz-5 means Ukraine’s role in Russia’s space industry has been eliminated. For Russian leadership, that is a win: it brings an end to a source of dependency on Ukraine and also provides a domestic alternative to Proton-M, an even older workhorse rocket that Roscosmos is also phasing out.

Part Old, Part New

Technically, Soyuz-5 is a medium-lift rocket. It is capable of sending 17 metric tons of payload into low-Earth orbit, though the rocket features slightly larger propellant tanks than its Zenit predecessor. Soyuz-5’s workhorse engine is the RD-171MV. A modernized variant of an older design, RD-171MV is the latest member of an engine lineage that dates back to the Energia program of the 1980s. Energia was the rocket that powered the Soviet Union’s short-lived orbital space shuttle, Buran. And the main feature of RD-171MV is that it does not contain any Ukrainian-made components.

The engine runs on a mixture of kerosene and liquid oxygen, or LOX. That fuels more than three times the amount of thrust produced by the Space Shuttle main engine; RD-171MV is currently the most powerful liquid-fueled rocket engine in service.

Soyuz-5, though, is an expendable rocket, while newer competitors—above all SpaceX’s Falcon 9—rely on reusable designs. The question is: could Soyuz-5 ever capture a significant slice of the lucrative international launch market? Soyuz-5 has a role for Roscosmos: it can fill in the gap until a new launch vehicle becomes available. With war-draining the national budget and the secondary effects of international sanctions, funding for a brand-new reusable rocket has been hard to come by.

Roscosmos has worked on the Amur rocket, also called Soyuz-7, to fill that gap. It has a reusable first stage and methane-based rocket engines, which could give it a price edge over SpaceX’s Falcon rockets. However, its maiden launch has been delayed several times and now is unlikely before 2030.

In the meantime, Soyuz-5 is a bridge to the future. It provides an opportunity to use and test new rockets, even if the technology dates back to the Soviet era.

And whether Soyuz-5 rockets can make a go of it in the commercial launch market remains to be seen. The industry has changed in the last 10 years: a new generation of rockets from SpaceX and Chinese providers offer competitive prices and flexible options. Russia is still running its Soyuz-2 for crewed launches and Angara rockets for larger payloads, but neither has managed to win significant international orders. Soyuz-5 is therefore not the commercial game-changer that it was a decade ago.

Nonetheless, Soyuz-5 represents a milestone for Russia. It would have been impossible just a few years ago, when Roscosmos still relied on foreign-made components and now nearly impossible because of a complex web of sanctions. A successful December launch would be a proof of concept: that Russia, even with limited funding and technical restrictions, can still launch new rockets.