Editing Tupolev Tu-144 (section)

===Tupolev design bureau and rivalry with Ilyushin===
Fridlyander and Moon point out that by the early 1970s, Tupolev's bureau had to work on other projects, including the [[Tupolev Tu-154|Tu-154]] and [[Tupolev Tu-204|Tu-204]] passenger aircraft, and the [[Tupolev Tu-22M|Tu-22M]] and [[Tupolev Tu-160|Tu-160]] bombers.<ref name="Fridlyander"/>{{sfn|Moon|1989|pp=185–186}} Despite large and high-priority resource investment in the Tu-144 development programme and the fact that a large part of the whole Soviet [[Research and development|R&D]] infrastructure was subordinated to the Tu-144 project, parallel project development overwhelmed the bureau causing it to lose focus and make design errors.<ref name="AyzatullovaSudakov2020" />{{rp|page=90}}

Alexander Poukhov, one of the Tu-144 design engineers who subsequently rose to be one of the bureau's senior designers, estimated in 1998 that the Tu-144 project was 10–15 years beyond the USSR's capabilities at that time.{{#tag:ref|Poukhov: "My opinion is that at that time, it was an aircraft that was ten or even fifteen years ahead of its time and the capabilities of the country", in an interview to PBS documentary ''Supersonic Spies''.<ref name="nova98" />|group=N}}

Moon suggests that Tupolev's difficulties in developing the Tu-144, together with a need to prioritize bomber development, prompted Soviet leaders to shift airliner development to the rival [[Ilyushin]] design bureau, which had recently introduced the successful [[Ilyushin Il-76|Il-76]] military transport and was developing the Il-86 to move much larger numbers of passengers at a much lower per-seat cost than the Tu-144. Moon contrasts the Ilyushin bureau's careful advance research into operating costs and its marketing surveys of Aeroflot customers with the "technocratic futurism" embodied by the Tu-144, suggesting that Soviet leaders recognized that the Il-86 better addressed real-world transportation needs in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.{{sfn|Moon|1989|pp=185–187}}