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From the (Kansas City) Daily Star Albany :
Recent moves in Congress to restrict the use of Russian rocket engines on national security missions sparked a revolution in the U.S. commercial space program. Private businesses such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, as well as Aerojet Rocketdyne, are lining up to offer homegrown rocket engines to NASA. Meanwhile, Russian President Putin just abolished his country's own Federal Space Agency, replacing 'Roscosmos' with a new corporation that "will design new spacecraft and implement new projects by itself."
But before you assume that Russia has been bitten by the Capitalism bug - don't. In contrast to SpaceX, which is a private venture, Russia's new-and-improved Roscosmos will be wholly owned by the Russian state.
Asserting complete control over the space effort is, to Putin's mind, a way to control costs and prevent corruption, such as when certain persons at Roscosmos famously embezzled or wasted as much as $1.8 billion in 2014. Whether the restructuring will also make space travel "cheaper," as [deputy prime minister] Rogozin hopes, remains to be seen.
SpaceX publishes a price of $61.2M USD for a Falcon 9 launch. Can Roscosmos compete with that? The Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture ULA finds that price hard to beat. So do the French and Chinese. From the article:
[...] California Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez described a conversation she had with France's Arianespace a few years ago: "They were telling me that their launch costs about $200 million equivalent. They said they weren't worried about UAL [sic] but could I get rid of SpaceX? Because they were going to drive them out of business!"
And over in China, officials interviewed by Aviation Week recently lamented that "published prices on the SpaceX website [are] very low." So low, in fact, that with China's own Long March rockets costing $70 million per launch, "they could not match them."
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday July 26 2016, @12:30AM
Boeing and friends will just make sure that The Good People of DC ensure that the crazy newcomer from a Blue State doesn't get the juiciest classified contracts. Once the profit margin is made on these, they can compete at the low end and point out to SpaceX that slim margins are a dangerous way to operate a low-volume business.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Tuesday July 26 2016, @12:36AM
The danger here is that SpaceX has had a long history of conspicuous success. The more successful they are, the harder it becomes to choose favourites like that. In the short term SpaceX is stealing oxygen in the commercial space launch business, which lets them grow much faster than their competitors. Being low-volume, rockets let you go parallel very quickly.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday July 26 2016, @01:13AM
Indeed, they already lit a fire under the ULA's [wikipedia.org] ass. SpaceX are the AMD to Russia/ULA's Intel.
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Tuesday July 26 2016, @04:51AM
Does that comparison also mean that SpaceX will suck ass and limp along financially for several years?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday July 26 2016, @01:59PM
If by "suck ass and limp along financially" you mean provide cheap rockets that get supplies/satellites to orbit, then yes.
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