Center. The new company's status was unique in that it was not subordinate to any ministries or to the Russian Space Agency. Vladimir Kirillov, writing for the Eksport Vooruzheniy journal, speculates that this was because Yeltsin's daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, who had worked at Salyut and continued to work for Khrunichev until 1994, wished to secure a high status for her employer. Success on the international launch market On 15 April 1993 Khrunichev had created the Lockheed-Khrunichev-Energia joint venture with the American company Lockheed, and in 1995, due to the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta, it was transformed into International Launch Services (ILS). The joint venture marketed launches on both the Proton and the American Atlas rockets. The United States had given permission for the appearance of Proton on the international launch market, but introduced a quota to protect the launch market from "Russian dumping." Despite this, the Proton, built by Khrunichev, was successful and by the end of 2000 had earned launch contracts worth over $1.5 billion. The income from commercial launch contracts and investments from Lockheed enabled Khrunichev to conduct a serious upgrade of its facilities. This included an upgrade of the company's launch facilities in Baikonur, for which several hundred million dollars were invested. The commercial earnings also allowed the company to develop new launch vehicles, boosters and spacecraft on its own without government support. Since its creation, International Launch Services has signed contracts for more than 100 launches valued at more than $8 billion. In 1998, Khrunichev was made subordinate to the Russian Space Agency, then called Rosaviakosmos. Khrunichev resisted the move for a long time, and managed to prevent the agency from installing its own leadership in the company. One disadvantage for Khrunichev was that the Blok DM upper stage, used by Proton, was manufactured by the company RSC Energia, and Khrunichev had to pay 40% of its launch revenue for its usage. Due to this, in 1996–1998, Khrunichev started the development of its own upper stage, called the Briz-KM. Partly because of funding difficulties, the development process was slow and Briz-KM experienced several failures in its early days. After a Briz-M failure prevented the AMC-14 satellite from reaching its designated orbit, several modifications were made in this upper stage. Integration programme In the 2000s, Khrunichev entered a vertical integration programme to bring its principal suppliers under a single management. For this purpose, Khrunichev absorbed