Roscosmos has signed a contract with the spacecraft manufacturer NPO Lavochkin to build a Russian lunar power station by 2036, with the reactor itself developed alongside the state nuclear corporation Rosatom under the scientific supervision of the Kurchatov Institute. The station is intended to supply power to the International Lunar Research Station, a joint Russian-Chinese lunar base programme, and forms part of a cooperation agreement with the China National Space Administration. The last time Russia actually tried to land anything on the Moon, in August 2023, the spacecraft crashed.
What was actually signed, and what it is not
It matters to separate two different things happening under the same headline. The bilateral cooperation between Russia and China on lunar nuclear power has been described in some reporting as a memorandum, the kind of statement of intent that commits both governments to a shared goal without locking in engineering specifics. The contract Roscosmos signed with NPO Lavochkin is a different, more concrete document: a domestic Russian agreement to build the hardware, naming the manufacturer, the reactor partner, and a target date. A memorandum of cooperation and a construction contract are not the same level of commitment, and treating them as interchangeable overstates how settled the engineering side of this project actually is.
The plan as described involves three lunar missions in 2033, 2034, and 2035, with the power module itself transported to the Moon in 2035 ahead of the 2036 completion target. The station is meant to power the ILRS installation, described in Russian materials as covering equipment ranging from lunar rovers to an observatory. None of those 2033 to 2035 missions have hardware built or launch dates fixed yet. A contract to build something by a target date is a stronger commitment than a memorandum, but it is still a plan, not a completed engineering programme, and Russia’s recent record with lunar hardware is the reason that distinction is worth holding onto.
What happened the last time Russia tried this
Luna-25 launched in August 2023 as Russia’s first lunar landing attempt since the Soviet Union’s Luna-24 mission in 1976, a 47 year gap. It reached lunar orbit, and during a manoeuvre intended to lower that orbit ahead of landing, the spacecraft’s engine burned for 127 seconds rather than the scheduled 84. According to Roscosmos’s own account of the failure, an onboard control unit failed to shut the engine down on schedule because it was not receiving data from one of the spacecraft’s accelerometers, which had not been activated due to a conflict in command priorities. The excess burn pushed Luna-25 into a trajectory that put it into the lunar surface on 19 August 2023.
The failure had a pointed footnote. Four days later, on 23 August 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission became the first spacecraft ever to land near the lunar south pole, the same general region Luna-25 had been aiming for. Russia’s return to lunar landing attempts, after nearly five decades away from the Moon’s surface, ended in a crash caused by a software and instrumentation failure rather than anything exotic about the landing site itself.
The broader programme Russia is promising to power
The International Lunar Research Station is the joint China-Russia programme this power station is meant to serve, and its own timeline runs well past 2036. China’s Chang’e-8 mission, planned for 2028, is a robotic precursor meant to test resource-extraction technology and scout landing sites ahead of China’s first crewed lunar landing, targeted for around 2030. Five heavy lift launches between 2030 and 2035 are meant to deliver the base’s initial infrastructure, with a more extensive network of facilities targeted for 2050. Seventeen countries, including Egypt, Pakistan, Venezuela, Thailand, and South Africa, are listed as ILRS partners, though partnership in these programmes typically means signing on to a shared framework rather than committing hardware or funding of their own.
China’s side of this partnership has a materially stronger recent record on the Moon than Russia’s. Chang’e-5 returned lunar samples to Earth in 2020, and Chang’e-6 did the same from the Moon’s far side in 2024, both of which succeeded on the first attempt. Russia’s most recent attempt at the far simpler task of landing intact failed for reasons that had nothing to do with the technical demands of a nuclear power station and everything to do with a data handoff between two onboard systems.
That asymmetry matters for how the partnership is likely to function in practice. The ILRS framework describes joint leadership between Roscosmos and the China National Space Administration, but a programme in which one partner has landed sample return missions on both the near and far side of the Moon and the other has not managed a single successful soft landing since the Soviet era is not likely to remain an equal partnership on paper for long. Rosatom’s reactor expertise is a genuine asset Russia brings to the table regardless of Roscosmos’s landing record, since nuclear reactor design and spacecraft landing guidance are different engineering disciplines with different failure histories. Whether that expertise is enough to keep Russia as more than a junior partner in its own signature contribution to the ILRS is a separate question the contract itself does not answer.
The gap between the target date and the track record
None of this means a 2036 lunar power station is impossible. Nuclear power in space is not new territory for either country’s engineering base, and Rosatom’s involvement brings a nuclear design and safety pedigree that Roscosmos’s spacecraft division does not have on its own. But a target date set by contract is a statement of ambition backed by a signature, not a guarantee backed by demonstrated capability, and Russia has not successfully soft landed anything on the Moon in the sixteen years since it began trying again after the Soviet era ended.
Whether that changes before 2033, when the first of the three planned missions is supposed to fly, is the actual open question sitting underneath the 2036 date.
