Have We Surrendered to the US in Space?

Yet another reusable rocket has been successfully tested in the U.S. Its creator is a private company. Why, after the first and only flight of Burana in 1988, haven’t we been doing anything of the kind? Do we want the U.S. to push us out of this market too?

Igor Afanasyev, an expert on rocket engines and launch vehicles:

Strictly speaking, the reusable rocket tested in Texas on Nov. 23 by the company Blue Origin is only indirectly relevant to space. The New Shepard system reached an altitude of 60 miles but didn’t enter the Earth’s orbit. In fact, what was tested was merely a prototype, designed for the development of new technologies and suborbital tourism. What we’re looking at is a system that will transport a group of six tourists to an altitude of 60 miles and back, and the entire trip will take no more than 15 minutes.

Will the U.S. push us out of the space tourism market?

American attempts in the field amount to developing systems for carrying out suborbital flights to an altitude of about 60 miles; for the time being they’re merely running test flights and not always successfully. They’ve been promising us such tourism since the start of the 2000s, but there still haven’t been any suborbital tourist flights as such, and all tourist orbital flights have been carried out using Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Will the market become crowded by commercial launches of spacecraft?

Until recently, Russian companies occupied a serious position in the market, earning good profit using the Soyuz and Proton launch vehicles. But then came the American company Space X, which could dramatically reduce the cost of launching cargo into orbit.

From the experts’ point of view, the significance of reusable rockets is at present dubious. Work along these lines is underway in Russia too. There are reusable versions of first-stage Angara rockets, models of such systems have been shown at the air shows in Zhukovsky many times. By the way, one of the reasons for halting work on the Energia-Buran program was that at the time the necessary payload for our shuttle simply couldn’t be found.