Interesting that they agreed to raise their prices and limit themselves to
a quota of launches. Another example of how things have fundamentally
changed. I don't believe SpaceX had to agree to those terms, and I bet
Krunichev wishes they hadn't agreed to them when Falcon 9 came along!
As I understand it, two of the Proton failures may have been to worker
sabotage. Don't know the possible motivation for that--certainly a wild
card in the whole dinospace vs. newspace equation.
On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 8:00 PM, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Sun, 11 Feb 2018, Paul Mueller wrote:
The Proton is a government-built rocket that first flew over 50 years ago.
The Russian government offered it commercially...
(Starting to catch up on some old mail...)
Just like the classical Atlas and Delta, Proton was originally government
built, but more recently it has been sold by Khrunichev and through the ILS
consortium. (And yes, the boundaries between Khrunichev and the Russian
government are a bit vague, but the same is actually true -- in slightly
different ways -- of the proprietors of Atlas and Delta, not to mention
Ariane.)
...probably at or below cost...
The profit margins on Proton are almost certainly large, since it's much
less labor-intensive than Western launchers -- the Soviets wanted
operational production launchers, not hand-built science projects, and
invested accordingly in mechanization and automation -- and salaries are
rather lower there. They originally tried to offer it at a price a whole
lot lower than the Western launchers, until the Western governments ganged
up on them and insisted that they raise their prices, and that they
initially abide by a quota to limit their share of the market. (If
companies do this, it's illegal restraint of trade and grounds for an
anti-trust suit.)
... It had a respectable number of commercial launches in 2010 (9 by my
count--thank you Wikipedia), when Falcon 9 had its first flight. It's been
a pretty steady decrease since then, with only 3 in 2017 (and 0 commercial
launches planned for 2018 according to Spaceflight Now). It may also be a
"dead rocket walking," thanks to Falcon 9...
And to Proton's rather poor reliability in recent years. For a while,
there was an interesting pattern in which all the failures were on Russian
payloads -- foreign commercial customers appeared to be exempt -- but that
pattern eventually got broken. Now people distrust Proton, with some
reason, and I'm sure the launch insurers are charging accordingly.
Henry