page_title: Roscosmos
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Roscosmos / History
caption_attribution_description: English: patch of the Russian Space Agency, abbreviated as RKA.
context_page_description: The Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities, commonly known as Roscosmos, is a state corporation of the Russian Federation responsible for space flights, cosmonautics programs, and aerospace research.
  Originating from the Soviet space program founded in the 1930s, Roscosmos emerged following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It initially began as the Russian Space Agency, which was established on February 25, 1992 and restructured in 1999 and 2004, as the Russian Aviation and Space Agency and the Federal Space Agency, respectively. In 2015, the Federal Space Agency was merged with the United Rocket and Space Corporation, a government corporation, to re-nationalize the Russian space industry, leading to Roscosmos in its current form.
  Roscosmos is headquartered in Moscow, with its main Mission Control Center in the nearby city of Korolyov, and the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center located in Star City in Moscow Oblast. Its launch facilities include Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the world's first, largest, and busiest spaceport, and Vostochny Cosmodrome, which is being built in the Russian Far East in Amur Oblast.
context_section_description: The Soviet space program did not have central executive agencies. Instead, its organizational architecture was multi-centered; it was the design bureaus and the council of designers that had the most say, not the political leadership. The creation of a central agency after the separation of Russia from the Soviet Union was therefore a new development. The Russian Space Agency was formed on February 25, 1992, by a decree of President Yeltsin. Yuri Koptev, who had previously worked with designing Mars landers at NPO Lavochkin, became the agency's first director.
  In the early years, the agency suffered from lack of authority as the powerful design bureaus fought to protect their own spheres of operation and to survive. For example, the decision to keep Mir in operation beyond 1999 was not taken by the agency; instead, it was made by the private shareholder board of the Energia design bureau. Another example is that the decision to develop the new Angara rocket was rather a function of Khrunichev's ability to attract resources than a conscious long-term decision by the agency.
caption: Patch of the Russian Space Agency, 1991-2004
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