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Astronauts Won't Be Flying To Space In Boeing's Starliner Until 2018 (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Boeing Starliner, one of two new spacecraft meant to break the Russian stranglehold on sending people to orbit, has hit a snag. Originally scheduled to start flying next year, the Starliner won't carry a crewed mission to the International Space Station until 2018 at the earliest. Six years is long enough. Ever since the 2011 retirement of the space shuttle NASA has been pushing for privately built craft capable of ferrying astronauts to orbit, which would let the agency buy American-made ships and end its dependency on renting seats aboard Russian spacecraft. The Starliner and SpaceX's Dragon were chosen, and 2017 was to be the year. But while SpaceX has sent its ship to the ISS on multiple uncrewed cargo resupply missions, the Starliner won't make such trips until 2017 and won't carry people until 2018 at the earliest. SpaceX maintains that it will be able to send crews to orbit in 2017.GeekWire explains: "For Boeing to shift its crewed test flight from 2017 to 2018 isn't as much of a slip as it might sound: The company's earlier schedule had called for the visit to the space station to take place in mid-December."
That's a good point, where in contrast SpaceX's Falcon 9 really is American made with the Merlin engines being made in the US. Every other year or so they announce a plan to build the RD-180 in the US - ULA announced it again late last year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180#US_production_of_the_RD-180 but there are a lot of technical difficulties with making a version of it in our factories. The Russians have done some very subtle and very careful engineering with it (which gives the engine its very good power to weight ratio and high ISP) and them duplicating would be tough. At the same time, there have been some issues with RD-180 quality control so it might be better just for that reason to produce it in the US, aside from all the national security concerns about relying on a Russian rocket engine for national security launches.
But if it's the same Boeing I used to work at, they'll have to subcontract out all the engineering. There's nothing left at that company other than a bunch of managers.
Russia does not have a stranglehold; like they are preventing others from doing so. The US has dropped the ball, which is shameful.
I would expect that the speed at which they get to Falcon 9 reuse would have an impact on the Falcon Heavy schedule (that speed, in turn, being relative to the rate that they keep landing them - the more they have on hand, the more risky they can afford to be in their return-to-flight testing program for them). Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy cores are extremely similar and made on the same lines, and the engines are identical. So the more line capacity they free up, the more they can dedicate toward the Heavy.
Monkeywrench Ex Machina.
We'll see what comes of the Vulcan, the promised replacement for the Atlas V, which will have american made BE-4 engines. Maybe the Vulcan will be in production once the Starliner is finally ready to fly.
I work for ULA and I can assure you that a rocket is a lot more than an engine and fuel tank. You are forgetting a sophisticated suite of Avionics, reaction control systems, pneumatics, and pyros for staging, payload separation and flight termination, just to name a few items. If you think the engine is the only difficult part to get right then you should tell that to SpaceX. Most of their problems including their recent launch failure have been caused by components other than the engine. The Atlas V also uses an American made RL-10 engine for the second stage.I work for ULA and I can assure you that a rocket is a lot more than an engine and fuel tank. You are forgetting a sophisticated suite of Avionics, reaction control systems, pyros for staging, payload separation and flight termination,