If my competition earns $1 per X, and I earn $0.10 per X, but I'm selling ten times as many of X, then I'm not particularly upset about my circumstances.
It's the Walmart retail model. Yes it takes them $476 billion in sales to reach $16 billion in profit, but they still do it.
Wikipedia says the entire family of Angara are to launch between "3,800 and 24,500 kg into low Earth orbit". There isn't a definite listing of the GEO orbit capacity, but we know it's going to be a fraction of the mass to LEO.
It seems the Falcon Heavy will have more capacity to GTO.
For cost, couldn't find estimates for Angara, but to compare Falcon Heavy with Proton (same GTO payload capacity as Angara, ancient tech): Falcon Heavy: $85M per launch for up to 6,400 kg to GTO Proton/Block DM: $95M per launch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_%28rocket_family%29 http://www.astronautix.com/articles/costhing.htm
That said, I'm a bit surprised they haven't integrated some of the same things SpaceX is doing (like N+1 capability in the engines vs single engine boosters) as those seem to be generally solid advancements in the state of the art of rocketry.
>"We have come to the conclusion that we do not need a new rocket, we can continue using those we already have," said Vladimir Popovkin, head of Russia's space agency [1]
I love that rocket development seems to be one of the areas where safety is a balance between redundancy and simplicity. If you put 3 highly-explosive engines with a low probability of failure next to each-other, you don't get redundancy unless you really control the failure modes :-)
Angara's RD-191 apparently can throttle down to an impressive 30%, so perhaps they could manage to "hover-slam" land their stages similarly to Falcon (though it'd be harder). But Russian speed in aerospace development isn't high right now, so it'd take a while.