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"Energia" was the designation for the Soviet Union's last big space project. A heavy-lift rocket that was primarily designed to carry a large shuttle-craft oddly similar to the NASA shuttles, it only flew twice before the fall of the Union. At that point, with most of the shuttles incomplete and little to no funding available, the design was essentially discarded. Certain parts of it, like the Zenit boosters or RD-170-derived engines are still used, but the design itself is decidedly dead. So, is there any way to keep it alive?

I think there might be, through two different means. First would be the US adopting it as the heavy-lift element of SEI or something similar. This requires that NASA manage that ill-begotten program much better, but it's at least plausible that they come up with something Congress can actually accept, soldier on to the fall of the USSR, and then point out that using the existing Energia as a heavy-lift booster would save a lot of money over developing their own version. And at that time the US/NATO was not averse to propping up Russian aerospace (after all, don't want those engineers in Iran or North Korea! Nosireebob!), so this might be an alternative to the ISS. In this scenario, I suppose the end-game would be a joint US/Russian lunar expedition or some such around 2000 or so, or possibly adopting ISS option 3 (a giant pressurized can) in '93 instead of the OTL modular ISS.

Second would be the Energia-M being adopted instead of Angara to replace Proton. From what I recall, the point was to replace non-Russian systems and launch sites, so the problem with Energia was and is that the Zenit boosters are built in Ukraine, not Russia. That isn't terribly hard to get around, though, and considering how many Angaras have flown, or even been built (none) to how many Energias, I could see someone pointing out that a bird in the hand is much better than half-a-dozen in the poison-covered thorn bush. In that case, you might very well see it flying by 2000 or so, since the proposed adaptations were relatively minor. It probably wouldn't totally supplant Proton for a while, since the latter has a very long and very good in-service record that is difficult or impossible to replicate.
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