When Frank McKenna took the reins at International Launch Services (ILS) in October 2006, he anticipated launching four commercial satellites per year aboard the Russian-built Proton rocket. This year, ILS expects to launch eight times, about double the number of launches on the Proton’s Russian government manifest.

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Warren Ferster is the Editor-in-Chief of SpaceNews and is responsible for all the news and editorial coverage in the weekly newspaper, the spacenews.com Web site and variety of specialty publications such as show dailies. He manages a staff of seven reporters...