In reply to Offwidth:
You’re preaching to the converted on the space shuttles. “Reusing” one cost about 15x the cost of equivalent disposable Soviet launch capacity. A highly compromised design with unrealistic cost forecasts and very poor safety. An abject failure of management at NASA and an attempted white-wash with the Challenger inquiry.
But that was the era of the Soviets; quality control has been a growing issue in the post-soviet era and it’s getting worse. There’s very little innovation left in their space program - it’s a testament to the Soviet engineers and American stupidity and croney capitalism that until SpaceX came along Russia still had the unambiguous lead, and that they still supply some of the best rocket engines in the world to the Americans. I used to work with someone whose wife worked at the Kuybyshev facilities; ten years before they were soviet scientists and western intelligence was purportedly classifying reports of their engines as misinformation as the specs were deemed not realistic or possible. Then the Americans are buying 100 of them from the warehouse...
Last night SpaceX did an engine test on their behemoth rocket, it could do a 150 meter flight any day now. Then it’s a 10 km flight. Made largely of steel, and targeting costs per kg to orbit less than 1/10th of the Russian costs, and able to put more mass and volume in to orbit than the whole ISS in one go. The Russian space program is going to loose most international income once this is flying; they’re already loosing it to SpaceX’s current generation of rockets; and they’re struggling to catch up with the current generation of SpaceX rockets. 40 years of expensive stagnation from the yanks gave the Russians an easy ride and they’ve stagnated. Blue Origin are taking a different route to fully reusable behemoth rockets. The times they are a changing!
Post edited at 09:16
