An old theater rises above the center of Baikonur, a dusty town in Kazakhstan near the cosmodrome from which Russians have launched humans into space since 1961. Long ago, Soviet soldiers mingled in its lobby and sat in its uncomfortable wooden chairs to watch propaganda films. In those early days, the Soviets often bested the United States with space milestones.

Today, after launches of Russian, American, and other astronauts to the International Space Station, the fliers’ families gather along with NASA officials in the theater to watch the Soyuz spacecraft dock to the orbiting laboratory. Afterward, they will offer celebratory toasts in the lobby against a backdrop of large, beautiful murals depicting Russia’s three great space pioneers. There’s the rocket visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky on the left, Yuri Gagarin in the middle, and aerospace engineer Sergei Korolev on the right.

All of those men have been dead for nearly half a century, and the Russian space program has been in a long slumber for most of the time since then. Yes, Russia is one of only two nations capable of putting humans into space, and it has an enviable record of launch safety, having not lost crew members since Soyuz 11 in 1971. Additionally, the most reliable American rocket, the Atlas 5, uses the exceptionally well-built Russian RD-180 engines to power its ascent into space.

Yet the Russians have lacked innovation. Even as NASA has explored the Solar System from Mercury to Pluto and beyond, Russia has not had a successful interplanetary mission in more than three decades, since 1984’s launch of Vega 2, a probe to Venus and Halley’s Comet. And although NASA is now reliant on Russia for transport to the space station, that could end as soon as 2017, when Boeing or SpaceX begin launching humans from Florida into space.

This all makes 2016 an important year for the Russian space program. Together with the European Space Agency, Russia’s Space Agency Roscosmos will launch the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission to send a lander to the Martian surface and map the planet’s atmosphere. It's due to liftoff in March from Baikonur on a Proton rocket. Russia is also working to develop a landing system for a follow-up mission in 2018. After the failure of the Phobos-Grunt mission to the Martian moon in 2011, Russia has a lot riding on these new Mars projects.

Roscosmos has also been tasked with completing a new spaceport in the far east of Russia, the Vostochny Cosmodrome. The new $3 billion cosmodrome is important to Russia because after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has had to lease the Baikonur facility from Kazakhstan. Russian President Vladimir Putin had urged Roscosmos to complete the spaceport in 2015. He has stressed the facility’s importance as far back as 2010, saying, “The creation of a new space center… is one of modern Russia’s biggest and most ambitious projects.”

But the cosmodrome has also proven to be one of Russia’s most vexing projects, with a litany of challenges and delays. In 2015 Russia’s Prosecutor General reported that $126 million had been stolen during construction. Additionally, a man driving a diamond-encrusted Mercedes was arrested in June after embezzling $75,000 from the project. Construction has also been hampered by unpaid workers conducting hunger strikes.

In October, Putin sought to put matters right by visiting the spaceport, telling officials and workers there, “I realize that we are building a unique facility here… but at the same time, we do need to keep the deadlines in mind and not let construction delays build up.” He also told workers he wanted the facility complete by Cosmonauts Day, the April 12 celebration of Gagarin's first flight into outer space.

For the last two decades, the International Space Station partnership has brought NASA and its Russian counterparts closer together, but now that trend may be reversing. Russia’s invasion of Crimea and agitations in Ukraine have loosened ties between the two nations, and conflict in Syria is adding additional stress.

In light of these geopolitical tensions, US lawmakers are not comfortable with the dependence of NASA and America's space industry on Russia. Congress has already ordered US rocket company United Launch Alliance to end its dependence on the RD-180 engines. It's not clear whether the space station partnership will continue beyond 2024. Russia’s space program may soon have to stand on its own.

This year, therefore, may prove pivotal to Roscosmos, which Putin recently brought under more strict government control. Can it launch a successful interplanetary mission and open a new spaceport? That would give the global space community some confidence that Russia is finally ready to move beyond the era of Korolev and Gagarin. It would lend credence to the country’s ambitious but already delayed plan to finally send humans to the Moon.

And if not, further delays and failures would provide more evidence that a once great space power continues to slide slowly into obsolescence.