Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center (ГКНПЦ им. М. В. Хру́ничева in Russian) is a Moscow-based producer of spacecraft and space-launch systems, including the Proton and Rokot rockets. The company's history dates back to 1916, when an automobile factory was established outside Moscow. It soon switched production to airplanes and during World War II produced Ilyushin Il-4 and Tupolev Tu-2 bombers. A design bureau, OKB-23, was added to the company in 1951. In 1959, the company started developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, and later spacecraft and space launch vehicles. The company designed and produced all Soviet space stations, including Mir. OKB-23, renamed to Salyut Design Bureau, became an independent company in 1988. In 1993, the Khrunichev Plant and the Salyut Design Bureau were joined again to form Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center. In the 1990s, the company entered the International Launch Services joint-venture to market launches on its Proton rocket. Khrunichev subsequently became a successful launch service provider on the international space launch market.
The company currently has an over 30% market share of the global space launch market, and its revenue from commercial space launches in 2009 was $584 million. Current number of employees - about 35,000. It is named after Mikhail Khrunichev, a Soviet minister.
Read more about Khrunichev State Research And Production Space Center: Production, List of Rockets and Missiles
Famous quotes containing the words state, research, production, space and/or center:
“The story is told of a man who, seeing one of the thoroughbred stables for the first time, suddenly removed his hat and said in awed tones, “My Lord! The cathedral of the horse.””
—For the State of Kentucky, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Play is a major avenue for learning to manage anxiety. It gives the child a safe space where she can experiment at will, suspending the rules and constraints of physical and social reality. In play, the child becomes master rather than subject.... Play allows the child to transcend passivity and to become the active doer of what happens around her.”
—Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)