Last Tuesday, the Russian news agency TASS ran a story with a surprising statement.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin believes that Russia should by no means seek competition with Elon Musk and his company SpaceX on the market of launch vehicles, because this segment constitutes a tiny 4% of the overall market of space services.
"The share of launch vehicles is as small as 4% percent of the overall market of space services. The 4% stake isn’t worth the effort to try to elbow Musk and China aside," Rogozin said in an interview on the RBC-TV channel on Tuesday.
According to Rogozin, the real money in space is in “payload manufacturing." That is, building the satellites, rather than the rockets that launch them. But that statement contains a number of problems. First, the market for launching satellites is a lot more lucrative than Rogozin is indicating. Second, Russia has much less of the satellite market than it does the launcher market. And third, the reason Rogozin is rushing to make this statement seems to be that Russia is losing the space race. Again.
Since 2000, there have been 1336 launches to orbit. Of those, 495—37 percent—have come from Russia. That’s far higher than the 354 launches made from the United States, the 203 from China, or the 126 made by the EU. It might not seem possible that Russia is continuing to launch what would appear to be a dominant portion of the world’s orbital vehicles, and still losing. But there are some details hiding behind those totals that indicate Russia has a serious issue. It’s one that hits it the country in both its pocketbook and its pride.
And it’s hitting it right now.
In the late 1950s and into the first years of the 1960s, the Soviet Union seemed to have an enormous edge in space exploration. The first orbital satellite. The first animals in space. The first animals returned from space. The first man in space. The first woman in space. The first probe to fly past the moon. The first probe to land on the moon. The first spacewalk. The first rover. The USSR did it all.
Then the United States, shocked and frightened by technological edge that the Soviets were demonstrating to the world, applied a nearly unlimited effort to catch up. Spurred on by John F. Kennedy’s audacious target of going from zero to the moon in under a decade, the United States built an industry, and an infrastructure, and an achievement, and … called it done. The United States went on to send spectacular probes to the planets, and build the space shuttle, then called the space race over, while consumers everywhere enjoyed the benefits that the push into space had generated.
But even as the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia never stopped going to space. The sheer number of flights they accomplished is daunting. For the R-7 family of rockets alone—the group that includes Votok and Soyuz—Russia has conducted 1803 launches. They’ve not just been a player, but a dominant player
With few exceptions, Russia has been at the top of the launch charts, year in and year out, going back decades. It’s only since 2015 that they’ve had a steady decline. But there’s more to it than just a couple of bad years.
Comparing the relatively “healthy” year of 2010 with 2017, shows that Russia has seen a slight decline in the number of launches it dedicates to its own military, research, and communications. Part of this has been that it’s no longer adding to the GLONASS navigation network. The number of manned flights hasn’t changed, because Russia has the only tickets in town for manned flights to the ISS.
But the decline in cargo missions to the ISS and the huge drop in satellite launches done for other nations shows why Rogozin was delivering his gloomy message—Russia is losing the ability to compete in the launcher market. Despite what Rogozin indicates, that’s a big deal. Russia makes a large profit on these launches.
The estimated cost of a Proton launch is between $40 and 60 million. But the charge to customers in 2015 was around $300 million. Russia has been trying to drop their prices to stay competitive, but with the current list price on a Falcon 9 at $61 million, they’re simply not competitive. And Falcon launches continue to get cheaper. That’s why the schedule for 2018 looks even worse for Russian launchers.
There’s another number on that last chart that should worry Russia—those four manned missions a year to the ISS. NASA currently pays over $80 million per seat for astronauts to be ferried to the ISS. But both Boeing and Space X are working to take over that market within the next 12 months. That alone could represent a loss of over $600 million in annual revenue for Russia.
The historic ‘space race’ may have ended decades ago, but Russia has remained a player in space ever since. And dollars from launchers and launch services have remained a significant revenue stream for the Russian government. That stream is drying up, and Russia does not seem poised for a comeback. Neither do they, despite what Rogozin suggested, seem positioned to capture even a small fraction of the market for building space hardware.
Note: flight information for this post came from the fantastic resource Gunter’s Space Page. And yes, I made a fresh donation.