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Russian RD-180 Embargo Could Boost American Rocket Industry
MarkWhittington (1084047) writes According to a Saturday story in the Los Angeles Times, the recent revival of tensions between the United States and Russia, not seen since the end of the Cold War, may provide a shot in the arm for the American rocket engine industry. Due in part in retaliation for economic sanctions that were enacted in response to Russian aggression in the Ukraine, Russia announced that it would no longer sell its own RD-180 rocket engines for American military launches. This has had American aerospace experts scrambling to find a replacement. The stakes for weaning American rockets off of dependency on Russian engines could not be starker, according to Space News. If the United States actually loses the RD-180, the Atlas V would be temporarily grounded, as many as 31 missions could be delayed, costing the United States as much as $5 billion. However SpaceX, whose Falcon family of launch vehicles has a made in the USA rocket engine, could benefit tremendously if the U.S. military switches its business from ULA while it refurbishes its own launch vehicles with new American made engines.
SpaceX and the American people thank you, Mr Putin.
"Atlas V would be temporarily grounded, as many as 31 missions could be delayed"
It sounds like it should save the government money.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
That the official operating procedure for the biggest military on Earth, many times over, is to buy mission critical equipment from anywhere that will sell it the cheapest and to not have any redundancy in place to ensure continued supply or alternatives?
What is the point of even having a military if that military requires good relationships with all other powerful nations on Earth to continue to function.
I can only imagine the level of damage a Chinese embargo would do.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Ah no. At best, they lease it. Of all people you should realize the impermanence of ownership.
As as aside, it should be pointed out that the Russia isn't the only country that makes rocket engines. Arianespace has some perfectly cromulent launch systems available for hire. Bulk discounts likely available. The advantage for them is that they are quite further along with the systems integration than SpaceX.
However, it may be even less politically palatable to be beholden to the .... French .... for space access.
'Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time.'
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Wait... does anyone seriously think that Congress will pass funding for anything related to NASA and the space programs? The current, Tea Party locked, science committee that recently called Climate Science "not science at all", Congress???
Good luck with that.
Unless it's a back-scratch back-room subsidy for their ilk and/or a state they wanna buy votes outta, forget it. Not ... going... to... happen.
I actually had no idea we were buying Russian rockets.
Oh well, at least they are better than North Korean models.
So, what is the Arianes launch record and failure determinations?
I wonder if SpaceX has a design for a heavy lifter yet...
There is a great documentary on YouTube on the subject of the engines and United Launce Alliance's work on buying them from Russia to be fitted to launch vehicles. The Russians were doing things with their engines which Americans thought impossible until they were demonstrated first-hand. This video has those initial tests towards the end of the file.
The Engines That Came in From The Cold
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Oh yeah...
FTFY, just so you kids get some context.
That is a quite contorted spin on events. You seem to hold an underlying premise that the Ukraine is a client state of Moscow and does not have the right to voluntarily establish economic relations with the EU nor military relations with NATO. And that Moscow is justified for invading and meddling in Ukrainian internal affairs when the Ukrainians decide Moscow is perhaps not their best option as a partner or friend.
And you take things further with an outright lie. Sanctions followed the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, no sanctions existed as the Ukraine was seeking to improve its relationship with the west, there was no "parallel to".
The charter for Stora, a Swedish mining company, was granted in 1347. It's probably the oldest limited-liability corporation in the world. Yes, it's still around today.
Caused by merchants bringing infested vermin to a trusting customer?
Ha ha. How ribald! Your mockery of America is quite original and unexpected. Why, you must be quite the intelligent fellow with such novel wit.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
NATO expansion to the Ukraine
NATO never expanded to the Ukraine. Their government asked to join in 2008 but was turned down; it's never been seriously considered since then. Perhaps you're confusing NATO, a US-dominated military alliance, with the European Union, which has nothing to do with the US (militarily or otherwise). It's the kind of distinction I can imagine the Russia Today writers glossing over, but these things do actually matter in the real world.
Shame it's not in the US. Then it would hold the world record for oldest person in the world as well.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Currently the first stage (by far the most expensive; ~70% of the total launch cost for the Falcon 9 stack) and the spacecraft capsule (specifically, the just-unveiled Dragon 2) are reusable or close to it. The ablative heat shield on the capsule puts a limit on its lifetime unless they can replace the shield, but the rest of it supposed to be fully reusable with little more than refilling consumables, and the shield is supposed to survive multiple re-entries. The second stage and the spacecraft trunk section are not yet observed to have any upgrades for reuse, although there are already talks of how to make the second stage reusable. The trunk is inexpensive; I don't know if it's even worth the cost (in payload capacity) to recover it.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no parts (except possibly an explosive bolt or three?) that are single-use on the capsule or the first stage. The first stage engines are already relightable - the booster makes a propulsive landing - and so are the "superdraco" landing thrusters on the Dragon 2.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
They haven't. When closed circuit technology was discovered by US after Cold War ended, most rocket scientists simply didn't believe it was real. To specify: they thought that closed circuit liquid fuel rocket booster technology was impossible to build. Until they tested the engine in their own facility, many of them thought they were being lied to about specifications of the engine in question.
To quote Lockheed Martin engineer: "This discovery made us ask some very uncomfortable questions about our own development processes".
This sort of stuff is not something you can just copy. This is what Chinese discovered when they copied Russian aircraft. They could copy the airframes and the engines but... engines would only last a few flights and then break down. Because building extremely complex components like jet and rocket engines requires extremely complex understanding of the process itself as well as material technology. Something you cannot acquire through simply copying it. And Russians are known to have destroyed many, many rockets and spent many years perfecting that particular rocket engine before it would actually work instead of suffering a catastrophic failure of some kind. It was that difficult to get to work right. This is not something that you can just grab and reverse engineer. You'll have to blow up quite a few rockets, or do some very difficult simulation work to get to work.
This is a problem of metallurgy, process technology and construction process itself. Things you cannot copy just by reverse engineering the end product.