Russia will finally send a team of cosmonauts to the Moon – more than 40 years after Neil Armstrong's Apollo effectively ended the US-Soviet space race. The Roscosmos space agency also plans to deploy research stations on Mars. In this gallery, we look back at the history of the The Soviet and Russian space programme.
1. 4 October 1957: Sputnik I was launched by the Soviet Union from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, becoming the first artificial satellite to be put into Earth's orbit, and kicking off the space race in earnest. (AFP/Getty Images)
2. 3 November 1957: Laika the dog became the first living creature to orbit the Earth, onboard Sputnik II. Laika died a few hours after launch from stress and overheating, probably because of a malfunction in the thermal control system. The timing of her death wasn't made public until 2002 - instead the Soviets claimed she died on her sixth day in space. (TASS / AFP/Getty)
3. 19 August 1960: Two dogs, Belka and Strelka, became the first living creatures to go into orbit and return alive. They were accompanied by a rabbit, some mice, flies, plants and fungi. All returned alive. (Central Press/Getty Images)
5. ...Vostok 1, carrying Yuri Gagarin, blasts off from Baikonur cosmodrome (Rex Features)
6. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev embraces cosmonauts Gherman Titov and Yuri Gagarin after Titov became the second man to orbit our planet. He spent 25 hours in space, becoming the first person to sleep in orbit. Just 25 years old at the time, he remains the youngest person ever to go into space. (TASS / AFP/Getty)
7. 16 June 1963: Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. It took another 19 years until a second woman, Svetlana Savitskaya, made it into space. (RIA Novosti / Alamy)
8. 18 March 1965: Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov stepped from the spaceship Voskhod 2 to become the first man to walk in outer space. (Central Press/Getty Images)
9. 3 February 1966: The unmanned Luna 9 craft became the first spacecraft to achieve a soft landing on the Moon. This photo of the surface of the Moon was sent back to Earth by the Soviet spacecraft. (Interfoto / Alamy)
11. 1968: Soviet scientists examine two tortoises after they returned from a trip to the Moon aboard the Zond 5 spacecraft. The craft, carrying a biological payload including flies, mealworms, plants and bacteria - as well as the two tortoises - looped around the Moon and splashed down in the Indian Ocean a week after lift-off.
12. 17 November 1970: Lunokhod 1 became the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another celestial body. The rover conducted analysis of the Moon's surface and sent back more than 20,000 photographs until the Soviets finally lost contact with it after 322 days. (Andy Lauwers / Rex Features)
13. 1975: The Venera 9 mission to Venus became the first to land on another planet and to return images from the surface of another planet...
14. 17 July 1975: Commander of the Soviet crew of Soyuz, Alexei Leonov (L) and commander of the American crew of Apollo, Thomas Stafford, shake hands in space, somewhere over Western Germany, after the two spacecraft docked successfully. This was the last manned US space mission until the first Space Shuttle flight in April 1981. (AFP/Getty Images)
15. 25 July 1984: Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to perform a space walk. She was also the second woman in space, 19 years after Valentina Tereshkova, and one year before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. (RIA Novosti / Alamy)
16. 1989 to 1999: Mir became the first permanently manned space station. Construction started in 1986, and the defunct station was allowed to fall back to Earth in 2001. (Rex Features)
17. 1987-88: Vladimir Titov (left) and Musa Manarov became the first people to spend more than a year in space, after a mission lasting 365 days, 22 hours and 39 minutes. (RIA Novosti / Alamy)
18. 6 May 2001: The world's first space tourist, American multimillionaire Dennis Tito, gestures after landing in a remote Kazakh steppe. He blasted off on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and spent nearly eight days in orbit, visiting the International Space Station. (REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov)
9. 3 June 2010 to 4 November 2011: A crew of volunteers (three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian and a Chinese citizen) lived and worked in an enclosed pod, simulating a 520-day manned mission to Mars... (ESA / AFP/Getty Images)
20. ...The crew of the MARS-500 programme carried out three simulated Mars-walks, before 'returning' to 'Earth'. (Sergey Ponomarev/AP)