A moon suit on eBay

A Krechet-94 cosmonaut suit, built for the Soviet Moon landing that never happened, is listed for £258,000. Free shipping included.

Russian agents are hunting the seller

The vendor goes by Maksuta and sells to US millionaire collectors. Russian agents are now tracking him down.

The Kremlin wants it home

The Putin regime has pledged to bring the suit back to Russia, according to people familiar with the matter.

We are watching

A Russian security source framed the sale as a national insult and said agents monitor this trade closely.

“It is scandalous that historical artefacts like this space suit are being hawked around the West when they should be here in Russia.”

The FSB takes the case

Russia's domestic security service handles rogue traders who sell pieces of the country's history abroad.

Five years for a spacesuit

Sellers caught and tried in Russian courts face fines up to one million rubles, five years in prison, or five years of hard labour.

What the FSB has done before

Alleged FSB officers tracked Alexei Navalny for years before poisoning him with Novichok in 2020.

A killing in Berlin

Former Chechen fighter Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was shot in a Berlin park in 2019. German courts ruled Russian authorities ordered it.

Vanished in Kyiv

Activist Leonid Razvozzhayev disappeared in 2012 and surfaced in Moscow two days later, saying he had been abducted and tortured. He got four and a half years.

The seller nobody can name

Maksuta emails spacesuit catalogues to American buyers and claims to be a Russian scientist's son. His real identity is unknown.

A trail to mission control

Spaceflight scientist Alexander Martynov worked at Russian mission control until 1992, then sold VIP space tours. His site was built by Maksim Martynov, a possible son, and possibly Maksuta.

One of twenty-two

The Zvezda factory near Moscow made just twenty-two Krechet suits for the USSR's lunar programme. This is one of them.

Built as a lifeboat

Designed in 1967 for the moon's surface, the Krechet doubled as a survival shell. If the lunar module started leaking air, a cosmonaut could climb in through a hatch on the back.

The programme that died

After repeated rocket explosions and six American moon landings, the Soviets scrapped the effort in 1974. Staff were told to stay quiet, and hardware was destroyed or buried in archives.

How the suits got out

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, unpaid officials sold off state warehouse contents worldwide and scientists pawned what they had kept.

Sold at flea markets

Museums and factories were abandoned and local government fell apart. Parts of spacesuits turned up on Moscow market stalls in the 1990s.

The law that made it a crime

Russia banned exports of culturally valuable items in 1993, and the FSB has monitored such sales ever since. Goods still leave through smuggling corridors in Eastern Europe.

“Under current Russian law, smuggling cultural property valued at more than 100,000 rubles is a criminal offence.”

Who is buying

Robert Pearlman of collectSPACE verifies memorabilia for wealthy buyers and has watched American entrepreneurs spend millions building spacesuit collections.

“Where you find individuals that have done well for themselves and grew up during the space program, you find people who are buying up space memorabilia.”

Buying back a childhood

Collectors put suits in their offices, donate them to local museums, and let their kids take them to show-and-tell.

“They want to live vicariously through that piece, to be able to touch it, to be able to see it and then to be able to study it as well.”

Why Soviet suits, not American

NASA and a few private collectors hold nearly all the US suits, so old Russian gear is simply easier to get hold of.