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.

Comments

thankX

[harvey the nerd]

SpaceX and the American people thank you, Mr Putin.

Re:thankX

[Teancum]

Name the mission that "goes up in flames" with the engine, then you can complain. Lockheed-Martin had engines made by American companies and even told Congress that even the Russian engines they purchased could be made in America (as recently as February when they made that pronouncement again under oath at a congressional hearing). This whole thing is a problem of their own making, and I hardly loose sleep or cry that they made themselves so vulnerable because of foreign outsourcing of their product line. All in the name of trying to make a buck or two extra.

Re: thankX

[beltsbear]

Care to back that up with anything? The last engine test that blew up was a Russian one for a Antares rocket. The last rocket to fail with payload was a Russian proton.

Soyuz and space shuttle are almost identical for loss of crew rates. Russian rockets are not more reliable.

Re:thankX

[shutdown -p now]

If you look at the raw numbers (total number of launchers vs failures), the most reliable engines today are actually Chinese, with American next, and then Russian.

Are you actually telling me?

[wisnoskij]

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.

Re:Are you actually telling me?

[Trepidity]

"Running the government like a business" has been a catchphrase used by both major parties for some years now. Outsourcing in order to save money is standard practice in business. Is it surprising that they did exactly that?

Re:Are you actually telling me?

[msauve]

"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."

To redistribute money from common taxpayers to military-industrial complex corporations.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

- Dwight Eisenhower

Re:Are you actually telling me?

[Jane Q. Public]

"Running the government like a business..."

Is a distortion of the old principle that the government should be run "more like" a business. But not "like" a business. Some people took that idea, interpreted it kind of sideways, and made the government run like a BAD business.

"Outsourcing" to your own competitors has never been good business.

Re:Are you actually telling me?

[sumdumass]

Actually, out sourcing like this made perfect sense.

It started at a time which we wanted to calm down a threat. You, lile many others in this thread think this was only about being cheep and saving money. It is or was not. When we started buying from the Russians, it was about funneling money to them in ways that didn't create resentment while dealing with their concerns about continued US military strength after the colapse of the USSR.

In short, this had more diplomatic reasoning than financial when it was implemented. It served those diplomatic purposes well until recently when the advantage has been turned around. But ignoring the diplomatic aspect originally involved does not explain the situation properly.

Re:Hooray for the private sector, I guess

[ColdWetDog]

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.'

Congress

[jeff13]

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.

Re:Congress

[the gnat]

does anyone seriously think that Congress will pass funding for anything related to NASA and the space programs

If it's sold as a matter of national security and economic competitiveness, and especially if it's sold as an uplifted middle finger to the Russians, I can imagine this happening. Rocket launches are used for lots of other things besides climate science, most of which aren't terribly controversial. And right now the US rocket industry couldn't possibly hire a better lobbyist for its cause than Vladimir Putin.

Documentary on the engines

[Krashed]

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?...

Re:Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah...

Due in part in retaliation for economic sanctions that were enacted in parallel to the NATO expansion to the Ukraine, Russia announced that it would no longer sell its own RD-180 rocket engines for American military launches.

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".

Re:Hooray for the private sector, I guess

[SQL Error]

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.

Re:Hooray for the private sector, I guess

[lgw]

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.

Re:Yawn

[the gnat]

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.

Re:Hooray for the private sector, I guess

[Nidi62]

Shame it's not in the US. Then it would hold the world record for oldest person in the world as well.

Re:Russians have better engines

[Luckyo]

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.