They still had Expansion Packs in the form of add-on disks before we had the Internet and DLCs. The quality varied a lot.

The main difference between Merlin 1C and 1D was that they switched from a tube wall nozzle to a channel wall nozzle. The Russians have been using channel wall nozzle since the 1960s unlike the US. So the Russian engines already optimized like that.

We should be able to compare the prices better once Orbital Antares gets the RD-181 and SpaceX has the Raptor working.

Reinvented. With resins. Neat.

The US was enriching uranium on WW2 with calutrons (which required shitloads of electricity to run) while the Iranians use centrifugues (which require a comparatively insignificant amount of electricity to run).

Revolutionary Iran is *expansionistic*, it has merely been checked in its ambitions.

So who did they invade in a war of aggression? *crickets chirping*.

Iran-Iraq war was started by Iraq. In the current war against ISIS they were INVITED in by the governments of the actual countries.

Sure they fund international terrorism but so do a lot of other countries. Some of which are US allies. Heck the US itself has funded terrorists.

You can easily reduce production costs by using mass-production. With larger production runs it becomes more cost effective to automate certain production processes. Lower unit production often also implies manufacturing in small batches, with more production you can change to an assembly line kind of production facility. You can also bulk buy materials with large production runs.

RD-170 family engines have had a much smaller production run than the RD-275. Also that article you linked to claims they currently charge more than $100 million a Proton flight.

The hypergolic propellant cost is probably a lot more expensive and it is not easier to handle than cryogenics.

I don't expect the cost of Angara to be low in the beginning.

At most it has a simpler ignition because it runs on hypergolics.

The RD-275 may be dirt cheap as you say but those engines also use a bipropellant staged combustion cycle so I don't expect the parts count to be that different..

Well this year they can rely on the oil price drop to camouflage the effect.

Yeah but as it turns out Orbital will be using some modified version of the RD-191 on the Antares because the NK-33 went kaput. Also be Russians claim they are selling the RD-180s below cost.

Soyuz is more cost effective, and more reliable. What else do you need?

There are also plans to retrofit the KVTK LOX/LH2 second stage into A5. The whole A7 may or may not happen. It doesn't matter as A5 with KVTK would have more performance than Proton.

The cost of handling hypergolics can be quite high. That is one reason why everyone is moving away from them. The costs for manufacturing the actual rocket may be higher but I kind of doubt it. Angara A5 is manufactured with more modern tools and it has less engines and parallel stages than Proton. Once it goes into full production the cost per unit is bound to be lower.

That article is old news.

Aborted launches happen all the time in the industry. Let alone in a new launch vehicle.

The Angara A5 vehicle they are talking about in that article was successfully launched last December.

They could use a better second stage for the rocket (i.e. the A7 version) but what they have is working fairly well. It would have been ready earlier if they didn't keep stalling the funding all the time. But it is ready now.

All that's needed is for them to finish the construction of their new launch site at Vostochny and Proton can be killed.

Yeah no kidding. The SLS is supposed to fly once every two years.

At least Soyuz is still around. And will be for the foreseeable future.