Russia appears to have surrendered to SpaceX in the global launch market | Hacker News Reader

Russia appears to have surrendered to SpaceX in the global launch market

arstechnica.com

18 pointsstartupflix7 comments

At which point is this "surrender" just a stubborn pride thing?

Russia could "easily" say: "well, now that this guy has proved that vertical landing is possible, we're going to start doing the same thing and compete on price." They would have the "second mover advantage".

What's stopping them from going this route, other than the embarassement that they were basically bested by one guy?

In my eyes reliability, having Russian expertise on metal working it is easer to build new rocket than create bullet prof inspection methodology and reuse it. That guy can lost trust with just few failed rockets and everybody will tell that vertical landing is not feasible.

Russia doesn't have the resources to develop new advanced technologies. Most smart people left for high salaries, ones remaining make money in business, not engineering.

Russia's space industry has essentially relied on tech developed during Soviet Union. Try to think of any technology that's not encryption related that was developed in Russia in last 20 years.

> Russia doesn't have the resources to develop new advanced technologies.

> Try to think of any technology that's not encryption related that was developed in Russia in last 20 years.

Yandex.

Parallels, Acronis, JetBrains but it is all IT. In aerospace all companies is government owned and and it is not possible to create private ones because Putin regime will take it away from you.

> What's stopping them from going this route

The same issues, that preventing them from fullfilling their promise to open Moon base in 2015.

They're behind in technology, in science, in work culture and they're plagued with corruption.

Was there any "surrendering" really? The only competing launch vehicle was Proton-M. My impression is that Proton-M developer Khrunichev basically collapsed because of reliability issues and poorly thought out production relocation strategy (from Moscow to Omsk). It has little to do with Falcon 9; ILS would have lost the market share to any other company due to Khrunichev's internal issues.

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