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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

I had assumed that Russia would want to embrace trying to land first stage boosters after SpaceX proved it was do-able. With the vast amount of territory they have they could avoid the trouble of trying to land on a droneship and perhaps even develop a large structure to catch fairings downrange.

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Roscosmos are working on a launch system with a re-usable first stage, Soyuz-7 or Amur [1]. The renders they've released are basically just a tweaked Falcon 9, except this one will be re-usable 100 times over!

Whether Amur will ever fly, or even become hardware ... I'm not holding my breath.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/russian-space-corpor...

I do wonder if Elon meant a certain 2 nations when Tim Dodd was with him on the Starbase tour.

There was a Raptor 1 full upclose to which he said something along the lines of, paraphrasing, "If you copy these then good luck to you, you're in for pain".

I'm sure they still know a thing or two about rocket engine design(!) but I can't help think that brain-drain will get the better of them sooner or later. These things require innovation, not just brute forcing old designs.

You are vastly overestimating Russia ability to innovate. Russia has basically not innovated since the Soviet Union. Angara rocket is supposed to be the 'next generation' rocket and its adoption has been painfully slow.

The idea that they could just build a reusable rocket is just not in the car.

Mostly what the Russian space program has been doing is announcing one absurd program after another. The amount of power-point designs announced by Russia is comical. They have announced a reusable rocket but like so many of the other projects, its mostly just propganda.

They have been using the same rocket for like 30 years. I'm not sure they are organizationally equipped to innovate anymore. Similar to the standard NASA contractors, who are rearranging shuttle parts to make the SLS and costing and order of magnitude more than even SpaceX's outlandish experiments from scratch.

Also its entirely possible the cost of a Soyuz launch is cheaper than a Falcon9 despite re-use, due to it being used for so long and slightly smaller.

Well, previously commercial outfits were choosing SpaceX in large numbers. So if Soyuz is cheaper, why not Soyuz. Both these vehicles have government orders which are never going on a foreign platform, so there is no price cap for those, but if I'm a comms satellite outfit (and there isn't currently a war) surely I just pick whichever is cheapest?

Soyuz isn't really in the same class as F9; its GTO payload is something like 2.5t, where F9 is like 5.5t. (The equivalent launcher on the Russian side was Proton at 6+t. And indeed, it sold lots of commercial launches until eclipsed by F9/FH... and its own poor reliability.) So Soyuz wasn't really competitive for most commercial launch, which until recently was largely GEO comsats. It was well-suited for MEO and LEO, which (until recently) was mostly scientific and surveillance, which is mostly government customers. But it was also well placed for the new commercial LEO com constellations, until they decided to throw that away.

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