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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...

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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.

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