One of the top space agencies in the world, Roscosmos (the Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities – actually: “Pockocmoc” if you care to get your mouth round that) runs the Russian space science program. The agency is involved in various space activities that include:

1. Reforming and promoting development of the Russian space industry
2. Design, development, manufacture, and supply of space equipment
3. Cooperating with other countries’ space programs at the International Space Station
4. Developing and managing Russian space facilities
5. Launching payloads and humans into space

Roscosmos has been involved in several space missions and programs. Some of the most notable ones include:

1. The development and launch of Zarya, Zvezda, and other space modules used to build the International Space Station
2. Fobos-Grunt, a Mars exploration, and research mission
3. The Soyuz rocket system – a launching system used to launch payloads into the low earth orbit
4. Resurs-P – commercial earth observation satellite system

Roscosmos is also planning a number of space missions, which are expected to be launched in the coming years. These include the Luna-Glob (a moon orbiter system) and Venera-D (a Venus landing system), both expected to launch in 2025.

Logo & Branding

The Roscosmos logo has all the elements present in the majority of space logos including a stylised type-face and accompanying graphic. Interestingly, it has been noted that the graphic contains elements of NASA’s logo, ie a red chevron (aeronautics) and a white/grey curve (space). Odd also, the trained eye will notice that the “S” letters in the site’s logo are compressed, while they are full width almost everywhere else. Uniquely this logo comes with a tag-line: “State Space Corporation”.

Layout & Content

The website has a constellation of stars on a pale blue gradient in the background of every page. This is overlayed with white content blocks with grey text. OK, so I and a number of space pioneers / venerates are getting old, but the small grey “Trebuchet” font used makes some of the elements difficult to read. Not only on desktop but also on tablet and mobile devices. Despite this the site, designed by Ray Studio, has a simple layout mostly consisting of text, as the majority of images have been hidden away in a gallery page.

Usability & SEO

Web developers have attempted to stop all search engines from discovering, crawling, indexing and ranking the Russian Space Agency’s English language pages from the search results – by adding a disallow rule to their robots.txt file, however Google is having none of it and is overriding this attempt as can be seen by Googling the name of the agency or clicking here. The site has a very low SEO score due to lots of duplicate content issues, but visitors will only find a handful of broken links and no missing images.

Site Stats – 2017

Call to Action

There are no calls to action or words of encouragement to reach out to the agency but there are a bunch of links to various social media profiles in the header – Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Instagram, etc. The contact page has no form and no email address, so if you want to buy their products or services, you may have to just give them a call or pop in.