Russia's space legacy is 'a shadow of its former self' — and Ukraine invasion isn't helping

"I see Earth! It is so beautiful!"

With those words, spoken by Yuri Gagarin, a new age for humanity was ushered in: the Space Age.

On April 12, 1961, 27-year-old Gagarin, a Russian pilot, became the first person to escape the bonds of Earth and orbit our planet. 

Those words were a sharp blow to the United States who, three years earlier, had been beaten by the Soviet Union in its attempt to get a satellite into orbit. 

But the Soviet Union wasn't done yet. 

While the U.S. followed Gagarin's flight with two of its own — Alan Shepard would become the first American in a suborbital flight on May 5, 1961, and John Glenn would follow as the first American to orbit Earth the following February — the Soviets would continue to dominate the space race right up until the Americans landed on the moon.

"The Soviet space program was quite significant," said Asif Siddiqi, a professor and space historian at Fordham University in New York. "They had a whole slew of firsts early on in the space race: the first satellite, first human being in space, first woman in space, the first probe to the moon, the first spacewalk, I mean, you can just go on. It's endless."

Today, Russia's space program is but a whisper of its former self. And its invasion of Ukraine — which has resulted in threats and barbs lofted toward the U.S. from the Russian space agency's head, Dmitry Rogozin — may have relegated its space legacy to the history books as it alienates past scientific partners and focuses its research on warfare.

Rogozin's warnings have come in the form of tweets. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he's told Americans that they'd have to use broomsticks to get to the International Space Station (ISS) after Russia stopped the sale of some rocket engines to the country.

While NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei was on the space station awaiting a ride home on a Russian capsule, Rogozin suggested Russia would leave him stranded. (The astronaut returned safely on March 30.)

Rogozin even shared a strange video showing a Russian segment of the station detaching, leaving Americans behind, suggesting that Russia would opt out of participating with the 15 countries involved in the space station.

"He's such a corrosive personality, tweeting all sorts of crazy stuff," Siddiqui said. "A good manager would have just kept their mouth shut and kept doing whatever, because their goal right now is: how does the [space] program survive?" 

"A good manager would have just started to say that, you know, space is above politics; we're trying to keep the program going. This is about peaceful exploration, science … but he didn't."

While Russia has continued to maintain a presence on the ISS, alongside other countries, including Canada, it is the American space program — led by NASA — that has been a stalwart in space exploration. (The Americans did, however, rely on Russian Soyuz rockets to get to the space station between 2011 and 2020 after NASA mothballed its space shuttle program.)