Didn't the Russians use a lot of steel in their Space Age era rockets? It always seemed to me like we went too high tech too quickly and the Soviets were practical to a fault, and the truth should be something in between.
I find it odd that Russia hasn't fought back and tried to do a reusable program of it's own. Putin talks big talk about wanting to develop high tech industries so why just give up on space?
His nuclear cruise missile program is so lame by comparison.
Russia needs an oil price of at least $74/barrel to balance the budget, which means they've been in a lot of economic pain for the last 5 years. Roscosmos was seen as a cash cow, requiring minimal investment to make reliable $ income off their mature launch business. As a result they were starved of investment and are a pale shadow of their former selves.
Building a dynamic, innovative organisation capable of developing a re-usable architecture would be very expensive, and unless they can not just equal but handily beat SpaceX, there's just no money in it. Their current launch systems already meet their military needs, so there's no political support from that quarter either.
I'm out of date. The Moscow Time says $49, but you're quite right in that Russia has done a lot in the last few years to bring their budget under control.
Their war chest is not looking too healthy though, the hit to oil prices in the last 5 years depleted a lot of their reserves. Thanks for the correction.
From memory the MiG-25 interceptor had quite a lot of steel in it for thermal reasons. Titanium was too difficult to work with for them at that time (or something).
Soyouz is simple.
Soyouz is reliable.
Soyouz is cheap.
Soyouz is in use for 50+
Soyouz is still there while NASA has no launcher available nowadays, despite decades of « on the edge innovation ».
Soyouz is great. Its an engineering marvel.
And Starship is likely to become even greater.