Russia-America space alliance

> I've heard that the Russian space budget is $170 million/year,
> approximately. That's less than one STS launch. It's difficult to see
> what 'alliance' means in that context, besides a one-way flow of money from
> my country (U.S.) to Russia.

You might be right that that's a bad thing. Still, it is very unclear.
For, when a country like Russia can launch hardware for an order of
magnitude lower cost than NASA, does America ultimately suffer more
or less for NASA to do something? I honestly don't know, but I suspect
they suffer more for NASA to do it. Doubtless the money that could have
been spent on the launch could have been on other things- towards
Mars or other targets.

> The dependence on Russia for ISS components proved to be disastorous to the
> U.S. Modules were delivered very late due to budgetary problems within
> Russia, and this lateness caused a lot of excess spending on the U.S. side
> --- you can't just lay off your entire workforce and then tell them to come
> back when the Russian module arrives.

It has also been said that 70% of the ISS is of Russian build; much
of the equipment being off the shelf, rather than having to be
designed from scratch. The Russians have had a space station for
decades... Would NASA have been able to design the same equipment
for less AND hit the schedule? Debatable. Very debatable.

> Many said in hindsight that it
> would have been cheaper to build the hardware that Russia ultimately
> provided within the U.S. instead. Based on this poor track record, I
> would hope that our U.S. Congress will look very suspiciously on any
> dependence on Russian hardware for any future endeavors.

It might be said that the people who said this might
have been in a position to gain from any such change to the program.
Looking at the X33 program, twice over budget and not delivering anyway
it is easy to see that a lot of programs get delayed. The Russians
delivered hardware that mostly worked.

> Sea Launch and ILS marketing of Proton flights and other services seem to
> be doing well. Less government is better with respect to these
> activities, so I would hope they are not part of your alliance plans.

Strongly agree.

> Russia needs dollars badly. There seems to be an idea floating about in
> ssi_list that Russia should offer its launchers to the world on the cheap.

I haven't noticed. There is an idea that Russia could offer its
launchers on the cheap, and perhaps could be made to offer its
launchers on the cheap. For many applications such as space
tourism, this would be an enabler; and the Russian space program
would be far better off with a larger overall profit, even at a
much lower percentage profit.

> I disagree strongly. I hope that they will extract the maximum willingness
> to pay from their customers, and reap the associated profits. If it costs
> them $x million to put a satellite into LEO or GEO, and they're able to get
> someone to pay $4x million for that service, then that's a good thing, not
> a bad --- they need those profits for a variety of reasons.

Absolutely. At the moment they seem to be making more like $8x million
per launch. Pretty good margin in any business.

But we need to remember something.

Right now we are transitioning from the high profit, low volume
portion of the development of space towards higher profit (lower %
of turnover though), very much higher volume part of the development
curve. Overall profits can go up by 10 or more times over the next
10-20 years, as we slide towards the very much cheaper access to
space that has to come, however unlikely that seems now.

> Ron Menich

civilization?"