At which point is this "surrender" just a stubborn pride thing?<p>Russia could "easily" say: "well, now that this guy has proved that vertical landing is possible, we're going to start doing the same thing and compete on price." They would have the "second mover advantage".<p>What's stopping them from going this route, other than the embarassement that they were basically bested by one guy?
Was there any "surrendering" really? The only competing launch vehicle was Proton-M. My impression is that Proton-M developer Khrunichev basically collapsed because of reliability issues and poorly thought out production relocation strategy (from Moscow to Omsk). It has little to do with Falcon 9; ILS would have lost the market share to any other company due to Khrunichev's internal issues.