Russia turns Elon Musk into Tony Stark

If the crisis in Ukraine did not exist, Tesla founder Elon Musk would like to invent it. The new cold war between the USA and Russia is helping Musk realize his dream of "wrestling" the American space launch market away from the behemoths Boeing and Lockheed Martin, who control it through their United Launch Alliance (ULA).

Elon Musk is a billionaire, the founder, owner, general director and chief engineer of SpaceX, as well as the chief designer, general director and chairman of the board of directors of Tesla Motors.

Musk's biggest assistant? Gruzny, zlobny, Russian nationalist politician named Dmitry Rogozin, deputy prime minister responsible for the country's military industry.

On Tuesday, Rogozin threatened to stop sales ULA RD-180 rocket engines, which the American company uses in its missiles Atlas V . "We will not be able to continue supplying RD-180 engines if they are used by the US for non-civilian purposes, and we will not be able to continue servicing already delivered engines on American territory," he said. This is Brother Fox throwing Brother Rabbit into the rose bushes. The mask must have refrained from jumping up and down and chanting: "I was born and bred in the rose bushes!"

On April 30, Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, won an injunction in the US Court of Federal Claims. He prohibited ULA from buying anything from the manufacturer of the RD 180, the NGO "Energomash", or "any other enterprise, governmental, corporate or individual, which is subject to the control of Deputy Prime Minister Rogozin". The decision was based on the inclusion of Rogozin in the American list of people sanctioned in response to Russia's actions in Ukraine.

ULA responded angrily and promised to resolve the situation quickly. The injunction was lifted on May 8, although the court case is ongoing.

To his dignity, the injunction did not have the right to exist for long. In Russia, state-owned enterprises account for 81 percent of the equally weighted average number of sales of the country's top ten firms, assets, and market value. Only China and the United Arab Emirates before it in the world possess such a measure of state concentration. If the US decides not to deal with any of the government-controlled enterprises that are directly or indirectly managed by sanctioned bureaucrats, they will create one of the harshest sets of sanctions ever imposed on any country. This, it seems, is not quite the intention of the American administration in drawing up staged sanctions, at least not yet.

In the meantime, however, Russia can shoot itself in the foot, because Rogozin is very angry with the United States - and Musk seems to be inciting him to do so. After the Russian Deputy Prime Minister scathingly remarked that as a result of the sanctions, the US would end up “using a trampoline” to send astronauts to the International Space Station, which Musk wrote on Twitter: “It looks like it could a good moment to introduce the new "Dragon Mk 2" spacecraft that SpaceX has been working on at NASA. No need for a trampoline."

Musk's problem is that the US Air Force is not considering SpaceX's Sokol rockets for its launch program because they are not yet certified. Although SpaceX says it can do the job for a fraction of ULA's price, more than $200 million per launch, the Boeing-Lockheed-Martin joint venture has the advantage of having completed 68 consecutive crash-free launches. SpaceX has only made nine so far for NASA and some telecommunications companies, and one of the payloads was lost. Musk did not wage any forbidden public war to enter the competition with ULA and has now seized on a joint venture using Russian engines as a strong argument.

ULA has a second rocket, the Delta, which uses US-built engines. At the worst, ULA could switch all of its launches to Deltas from the Atlases, and it has a two-year supply of RD-180s to ensure a smooth transition. In the politically charged atmosphere of the new confrontation with Russia, however, it is not the technology that matters as much as Musk's ability to present himself as a patriot, storming in to save his country from the vindictive Russians. My colleague Mark Hilbert recently suggested that investors in Tesla are really buying into the industry of Stark, the company of the comic book character Tony Stark, aka Iron Man. This is an apt metaphor. Like Stark, Musk wants to be the favorite high-tech supplier of the American government and has been quite successful so far: his projects, including SpaceX, have received generous subsidies.

More surprising than Mask's public lobbying is Rogozin's rude ignorance regarding the interests of his country. Russia, the leader in rocket technology, does not want to be isolated from the American market like China. Nevertheless, the head of Putin's military-industrial complex threatens to stop the sale of the engine, stop financing the International Space Station after 2020, and turn off the Earth's GPS control and measurement stations in Russia. Musk should pay this man a salary for creating a business opportunity for him for life.

Article Leonid Bershidsky for bloombergview.com