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SpaceX Wins Injunction Against Russian Rocket Purchases
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Reuters is reporting that Space Exploration Technologies, aka SpaceX, has won a Federal Claims Court temporary injunction against the purchase by United Launch Alliance of Russian-made rocket boosters, intended for use by the United States Air Force. In her ruling Judge Susan Braden prohibited ULA and the USAF, 'from making any purchases from or payment of money to [Russian firm] NPO Energomash.' United Launch Alliance is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin."
media weapons armies banks,,, hard to imagine he acted alone
It's a wonder that all the government spending on Lockeed and Boeing they have been unable to produce a viable engine themselves. They do have a huge lobbying force, so I doubt this is over yet.
Guess those Russian trampolines aren't so good after all.
The summary doesn't mention anything about "WHY" they made this ruling or why there was a lawsuit in the first place.
USAF awarded Russia a no-bid contract on 36 rocket boosters. SpaceX filed suit requesting consideration for the contract. The court filed an injunction to prevent sales being made while the trial moves forward.
It was great in theory. The difference between theory and practice being...
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Isn't it odd that US military assets are being launched (at least partially) by Russian hardware? Its especially odd when there is an obvious company that (presumably) manufactures almost all (except probably for electronics) their components here in the US. They're also the only company apparently at least trying to move forward with designs into making space cheaper & easier. I think the workhorses of the ULA (Atlas & Delta) area almost 50 years old with only minor updates & component switches, mostly due to the fact that the old hardware is no longer manufactured.
nazi zion WMD on credit free land freeloader religious cabalism is not new http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hitler+support+system
SpaceX are fantastic, world-class innovators, but lobbying the government to tilt the playing field their way smacks of rent-seeking.
I think there are potential parallels between Elon Musk and Richard Branson here. Both are lauded as Galtian supermen and heroe entrepreneurs; but at least in Richard Branson's case, he is an expert at conning governments into handing him extremely lucrative (government protected and subsidized) monopolies, as anybody who's had the misfortune of getting brutally arse-raped on a Virgin Trains season ticket (£6,000 from Milton Keynes to Euston, last time I looked), can testify.
see subject
From "Ad astra per aspera" to "Ad astra per embargo" apparently.
with the ongoing sanctions against Russia.
They aren't asking for an embargo. They are asking for a competition.
If it was just about the designs would could steal any number of them from ourselves (50 years of rocket engine designs to choose from). The issue appears to be the ability to manufacture, which we seem to have lost and would require time & money to restart. All that is except for SpaceX, they appear to build their engine in house. The Merlin engine is a bit less efficient than the RD-180 but its the most efficient hydrocarbon engine developed in the US.
Just as Russia resurrects the Solvet holiday of May Day
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I keep hearing this, but I find it difficult to believe that with all the flagrant corruption going on in Russia, it wouldn't be cheaper to build them domestically (unless the corruption is even worse here).
"ULA aren't worried, because they have enough engines in the back room to fill orders while ULA gets their manufacturing up."
ULA has a two year supply and just sold 5 years worth to the military. As if that weren't fun enough, Boeing & Sierra Nevada had planned on using that rocket for their crewed spacecraft launches to ISS. I hope they aren't in a hurry.
ULA prefers Atlas V because it is more profitable for them. But it uses engines from Russia.
The Russian engines are purchased from a company with ties to one of the people targeted by US sanctions against Russia... so the judge has granted the injunction to prevent purchasing those Russian engines.
ULA has a stockpile of some Russian engines already, and they have the (less profitable for them) Delta IV if they can't launch Atlas V for any reason... and running out of engines would be one of those reasons. But ULA would prefer to continue buying engines. But we've been paying them to have both rockets available, so they'd better be able to show up with what they've promised.
Separate from this injunction, SpaceX is asking for a review of the large block by of ULA cores, as it was done just before (a few days before) one of the final milestones of SpaceX being qualified to launch for the air force. I think it's not unreasonable for them to say that it's unacceptable to do a huge purchase when if you wait for a few days you would have multiple vendors competing for the bid.
Even John McCain thinks that contract smells fishy: link
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
We have an entire secret space program. Fully ran by non-terrestrial officers. (earth humans who live in space)
The reason these companies all of a sudden can't fly around is because everything is in black projects. You really think that 50 years later all of these companies can't fly around in space?
Look up Gary McKinnon and countless whistleblowers.
This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37 is just a trickle down that the public gets to see of the real good shit. All the secret spacecraft is classified top secret under "national security reasons" (the usual excuse)
It's all a farce, a show, a fake, a fassad, to give the impression that spacex is "americas space company" and "how dare the military use anything from those dirty russians"
The USA and Russia are in reality allies who work closely with one another, especially their intelligence agencies.
The difference between theory and practice being...
Cookies, a 5th of scotch, an angry monkey
How many cookies? It takes 900 quintillion cookies to win over the kitten managers.
Musk is now REALLY pissing off US Air Force, Pentagon and members of Congress (California districts in particular).
Expect to see somebody at "Musk Mission Control" hit the RED button to destroy in-flight his Apartheid campaign.
Ha ha
Harming Russians just because they are Russian is ridiculous. That is such an extreme form of racism that the average person doesn't even understand it. To the normal person, ie SE Asian, the idea that one white person hates another white person due to racism is insanity. I know the Irish hate the British for being more successful. The USAians hate the Italians for having a strong culture. The French hate every nonFrench white person for not being French. That is the way of whites. The average person is, obviously(!), not white so we don't understand these Republicans. USAians hating Russians because of their race is just bizarre. To us, they're both white.
A Russian invasion of Ukraine is not going to happen so long as everyone continues to do exactly what Putin wants. Nobody is seriously getting in his way apart from very minor annoyances. He's happy with a client state that does what it is told to do, and it's shaping up to be exactly that with no serious opposition from any direction.
So the promise to oppose an invasion isn't so bad since it's unlikely to have to be carried out. As for the ignored sanctions looking like weakness and the stupidity of getting involved I agree entirely, but there are hints that there has been some involvement for some time by US agencies dabbling incompetently in Ukrainian politics so abandoning them would have looked bad as well. Stuff that works in Central America doesn't have a chance versus ex-KGB that like to leave Polonium calling cards so it's the wrong place for rogue agencies to play inept games.
Especially when a lot of those boundaries were laid in place as land-grabs by the winners. Israel anyone? Yeah, don't mind us, we're just going to take this chunk of what's been your land for a millenium, including your most sacred religious sites and your entire Mediterranean sea border, and give it to a bunch of our allies who happen to also have a major axe to grind against you. Your team lost the war, so Suck It Up. We like hamstringing your economy and having a strong military base in the middle of your territory.
I'm not getting the Israel analogy here. Historically, the Jews never left the area, and post WWI, European Jews, who were @ the receiving end of pogroms, be it from Catholics, Protestants or Orthodox kingdoms, moved to Palestine where they bought land way above market rates from the local Arabs. In the meantime, due to WWII and the holocaust, support for the Zionist idea of creating a Jewish state where all Jews could live w/o fear of persecution, increased. No Arabs were displaced by Jews - most were encouraged to leave by the surrounding countries - Jordan, Egypt & so on.
Regardless of the history, fact remains that today, Israel still has a substantial Arab Muslim population - ain't that how 'Palestinian' is defined? (Never mind that the term didn't exist before 1964, and prior to 1948, it was used to describe Palestinian Hebrews, not Arabs). Those who left between 1948 & 1991, for whatever reason, should by now have gotten citizenship in whichever Arab/Muslim country they settled - Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, et al. The reason they haven't is that the Arab League has made it a matter of policy to keep them permanently in 'refugee' status, so that they can use them to demographically obliterate Israel, and reconquer it.
People who are concerned about ethnically re-drawing borders should look @ the Arabs - whether in North Sudan (Darfur), Iraq/Syria (Kurds), as well as their treatment of ethnic minorities like Copts in Egypt or Maronites in Lebanon. That would make even Russian treatment of gays look like Paris Hilton servicing her 'clients'.
Was there any polling data from the Crimea/Sevastopol that would suggest that most Crimean Russians were happy to be a part of the Ukraine, and did not want their land to be a new federal subject of Russia? Particularly given that different governments in Kiev had different opinions on whether Russian should continue to be a working language in Ukraine?
Uh, that's only implemented for some people, not others. For instance, Kosovo has been forcibly separated from Serbia b'cos Albanians are a majority there who don't want to be a part of Serbia. However, at the same time, in Bosnia, the region of Srpska, which is heavily Serb and whose people want to join Serbia, has been disallowed from doing so.
The West opened a can of worms on Kosovo, and Russia just proved the logic in Crimea, which NATO can't do a thing about. If only the Russians can back up the Serbs in occupying & annexing Srpska, that will puncture Western arguments in the region, and also illustrate even further why NATO is outdated, and has been since 1991.
Unlike Crimea, Donetz & Kharkiv are still majority Ukrainian: Russians are a large minority, but not even a plurality, so Moscow would have a weaker argument for annexing that area, than it did for Crimea.
Being moronic on foreign policy is these days a bipartisan attribute. In the 1990s, Clinton damaged the opportunity for improved relations by supporting the Chechens in their insurgency, and in the 2000s, Bush damaged the Russian (and other ex-Soviet) goodwill of 9/11 by opposing their regimes far more effective squelching of their Islamic insurgencies. Like Uzbekistan gave the US 2 airbases for their Afghan operations, but by diplomatically trying to embarrass the Karimov regime, the US pissed off Tashkent, who then closed those bases. Unlike the US, regimes like Uzbekistan know how to deal w/ jihadi insurgencies, and by reading them the ACLU playbook, the US just showed how incompetent it is in dealing w/ jihad.
money state pays = purchase cost + lobbying cost + profit