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The head of Russia’s space agency has accused tech billionaire Elon Musk of trying to squeeze Moscow out of the carrier rockets market by lowballing prices for commercial space flights. SpaceX has upended the space industry with its relatively low-cost Falcon 9 rockets. The company has completed more than 50 successful Falcon launches and snagged billions of dollars' worth of contracts, including deals with NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos Federal Space Agency, told state-run television on Monday that Musk sells launches from $40 million to $60 million “to squeeze Russia out...

Russia’s space agency has launched a heavy version of the newly developed ecologically clean rocket family Angara. The booster is to take its mock payload right to the geostationary orbit – over 35,000 kilometers from the Equator. “A 08:57 Moscow time, the heavy-class rocket Angara-A5 was launched by a Space Forces crew of the Arkhangelsk Region from the universal launch site of the state test facility of the Russian Defense Ministry [the Plesetsk Cosmodrome],” the ministry said in a statement. The success was reported by Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu to President Vladimir Putin, who was monitoring the launch form Moscow...

Russia's recent maiden launch of its new Angara rocket is a harbinger of bigger boosters to come. The successful test flight also marked the country's first new launch vehicle to be built from scratch since the fall of the Soviet Union. The July 9 suborbital flight of the light-lift Angara 1.2ML rocket lifted off from Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the country's northern Arkhangelsk region. (The "ML" stands for "maiden launch.") The test flight, which lasted roughly 21 minutes and was not intended to reach orbit, launched the Angara rocket over Russian territory on a ballistic trajectory. A "mass/dimensional payload simulator"...

MOSCOW — The first launch of Russia's new space rocket after two decades of development was aborted Friday moments before its blastoff, as President Vladimir Putin was watching via live feed. [....] Last month, the launch of Russia's Proton-M booster also ended in failure, and the same type of rocket also failed at launch last July, leading to the loss of three navigation satellites.