On August 19, 2023, Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the Moon during a routine maneuver meant to lower its orbit ahead of a landing attempt near the lunar south pole. It was the first Russian or Soviet lunar landing attempt since Luna-24 in 1976, a gap of nearly fifty years. Roscosmos later traced the failure to its onboard control computer, which did not receive the data it needed from an accelerometer to know when to shut off the spacecraft’s engine. Instead of firing for the planned 84 seconds, the engine ran for 127, pushing the probe’s orbit below the lunar surface. Roscosmos itself described the cause as “abnormal functioning” of the onboard computer, a control-software failure rather than a hardware or launch problem.
In the spring of 2025, not quite two years later, Russia and China signed a memorandum of cooperation to build a nuclear power station on the Moon by 2036, intended to supply electricity for the two countries’ jointly planned International Lunar Research Station. The signing took place during a visit to Moscow by Chinese President Xi Jinping, one of more than two dozen agreements reached that week, according to the South China Morning Post’s coverage at the time.
What the memorandum actually commits Russia to
A memorandum of cooperation is a statement of shared intent, not a construction contract. Georgy Trishkin, writing for the Carnegie Endowment’s Carnegie Politika in April 2026, was explicit on this point: the agreement is “a nonbinding declaration of intent, not a formal contract,” and the funding mechanisms and intellectual property arrangements behind it have not been disclosed. That does not mean nothing concrete has followed. According to reporting by World Nuclear News in January 2026, Roscosmos has since signed a domestic contract with NPO Lavochkin, the manufacturer that built Luna-25, to develop Russia’s contribution to the lunar power station. NPO Lavochkin’s chief executive, Vasily Marfin, said the project would require three missions to the Moon: infrastructure and support deliveries in 2033 and 2034, followed by delivery of the power module itself in 2035, with Rosatom and the Kurchatov Institute providing the reactor’s scientific oversight. Marfin also stressed the project’s complexity and its remaining uncertainties.
That contract is a firmer step than the 2025 memorandum by itself, but it is still a plan for missions that have not yet flown, built by an agency whose most recent lunar mission crashed into the Moon it was meant to land on. Roscosmos has said its next orbital mission, Luna-26, will not fly before 2028, with the landing attempt, Luna-27, currently scheduled for 2029–2030 at the earliest — six years after Luna-25’s failure and two years beyond what Roscosmos initially indicated in the aftermath of the crash.
Why nuclear power is the part Russia can still credibly offer
The broader context is a country with a narrowing set of things left to bring to the table. Russia currently has no lunar lander ready to fly, no super heavy-lift rocket of its own, and no landing system built for crewed missions. A 2017 proposal for Russia to build an airlock module for NASA’s planned lunar Gateway station stalled over funding and technical disagreements and collapsed by 2021; the United Arab Emirates took over that contract instead, with European firm Thales Alenia Space building the hardware.
Nuclear power generation is a field where Russia’s institutional experience is real and long-standing, running through Rosatom and the Kurchatov Institute rather than through Roscosmos’s more troubled hardware programs. The United States is pursuing a parallel path: in late 2025, it approved three separate nuclear power projects covering orbital, lunar-surface, and propulsion applications, backed by roughly $420 million a year in funding, according to Trishkin’s account of a NASA-Department of Energy memorandum tied to a Trump administration executive order. Trishkin’s broader argument is that nuclear power may be the one area where Russia still has something to offer either side of the current lunar competition, even as its position elsewhere weakens. His assessment is also blunt about the limits of that advantage: prospective partners, he writes, have generally preferred to develop their own nuclear capability rather than depend on Russia for it.
What to watch next
The 2036 completion date for the Russia-China lunar power station rests on a sequence of missions that have not started: Luna-27’s landing, not before 2028, and then the three dedicated power station missions Marfin described for 2033 through 2035. Roscosmos has a recent, well-documented history of missing its own lunar timelines.
Whether the domestic contract with NPO Lavochkin translates into hardware on a launch pad in the early 2030s, and whether the underlying Russia-China memorandum is ever converted into the funded, binding agreement Trishkin says it currently is not, are the two questions that will determine whether 2036 is a real date or another one added to a list.
