Russian RD-180 Embargo Could Boost American Rocket Industry 179
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.
thankX (Score:4, Insightful)
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The US should know better than to rely on that KGB goon for anything, particularly military hardware.
He'll cut off gas to countries - you think he won't cut off rockets?
It's simply bad business to rely on a supplier who is going to jerk you around like that, and worse defense policy to rely on an unstable enemy.
Re: thankX (Score:2)
Re:thankX (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Russian engines are reliable. American made ones who knows ?
Copying is easy, making sure the copy is as reliable as the original is a whole other game.
Re: thankX (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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To be fair, 2 each of Soyuz and shuttle missions have ended up killing their crewmembers. That NASA had 7 crewmembers on each of those flights vs. 3 and 1 on the Soyuz flights just means that the U.S. gambled more astronauts on each roll of the dice, not that they're less reliable statistically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]
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Just to underscore how unreliable the Proton is you are referring to not even the latest failure, that was the 2013 failure. Just last month ANOTHER failed. Russian rockets are not super reliable.
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I would assume they probably have upwards of a thousand little fiddly bits like sensors in each rocket...in which case, installing a single one wrong seems to be pretty damn good. Well, other than the fact that it caused the whole rocket to fail, I mean...
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Except the Atlas, Falcon, Anartes all having good reliable launches.
Re: thankX (Score:2)
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Yeah, totally. America has never had much luck with its space program!
Re:thankX (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: thankX (Score:2)
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Sure, until the first American made rocket engine goes up in flames
If ULA's engines fail, SpaceX had better run and hide. Congress/NASA/Pentagon will find a way to force ownership of SpaceX into the hands of Boeing and Lockheed. Priority #1 is to keep profits flowing to those two. Not to actually launch stuff.
Hooray for the private sector, I guess (Score:2)
Corporations — Less pissy than governments, since 1347.
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What happened in 1347? :p
Re:Hooray for the private sector, I guess (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
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In the defense sector, corporations are more or less proxies of governments. American corporations won't go against U.S. government policy, of course, but other countries' corporations might. American defense corporations don't defy the American government, Russian ones don't defy the Russian government, Swedish ones don't defy the Swedish government, French ones don't defy the French government, etc.
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US Govt Policy is whatever the companies paying the campaign contributors want it to be.
Of course they wont go against it. They thought it was a good idea when they came up with it!
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Yes, I know - hackneyed and trite. Still true.
Re:Hooray for the private sector, I guess (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [arianespace.com] 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.'
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However, it may be even less politically palatable to be beholden to the .... French .... for space access.
Oh yeah, one whiff of that in the press and the american space market is a sure thing. Not french rockets, freedom rockets! MURICA!
Re:Hooray for the private sector, I guess (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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You know why I'm sad that there isn't a god?
Because if there were, homophobic cowards would be able to feel good about themselves, since YHWH justifies both cowardice and homophobia?
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Nah, they're just as pissy, they just have smaller bladders.
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you're funny, some of those corporations, the banking cartel, have had government in their pockets since about that time
"Costing"? (Score:3)
"Atlas V would be temporarily grounded, as many as 31 missions could be delayed"
It sounds like it should save the government money.
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Pretty lousy, eh chum?
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No, it would cost ULA money as their contract states that the launches will be performed on Atlas or Delta but Atlas (with the outsourced russian engines) costs less.
ULA could launch on Delta (reserving the launches that NEED to be on Atlas for that launcher) but ULA would have to eat the difference. Very unpalatable for ULA that...
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And if the government got over it's SpaceX fear, it could launch many of them on the Falcon 9 for much less money.
Are you actually telling me? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
"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?
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Re:Are you actually telling me? (Score:5, Informative)
"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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Can you link to a Democrat saying that? I ask because being pro-business is the Republican stereotype.
they do have redundancy (Score:2)
One of the companies who makes the launch system was required to take out a license to produce the boosters themselves. This is the backup plan.
It's not a great backup plan, because just having the plans and license doesn't mean you necessarily can make them, especially with the reliability needed for defense launches.
Re:Are you actually telling me? (Score:5, Interesting)
To redistribute money from common taxpayers to military-industrial complex corporations.
- Dwight Eisenhower
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If Russia cuts us off and then attacks us, the sattelites currently up there would work just fine. The missiles would work. The airplanes and boats would work. The guns would work. It would take, what, several years before the satellites for weather and spying shut down and would need to be replaced.
It would just be a waste of money given the plans we had based on the rockets. Plans wh
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Except apparently the loss of those imports are already shutting down programs and canceling missions...
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It would just be a waste of money given the plans we had based on the rockets. Plans which, again, are not necessary for defense of the country. Actual war would undoubtedly be vastly more expensive too. And realize that the $5 billion lost was an estimate put forward by people who have an interest in the rocket industry: it's advertising.
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US military does not exist to defend US. It exists to attack foreign entities for US agenda. As a result, it needs a good number of spy and other military satellites in orbit to ensure it's intelligence gathering and other military purposes across the globe are as efficient as possible.
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yep, back in my day it was PowerPoint. Made in America
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For all their manufacturing, most of these devices sold in the U.S. are still U.S. design. The manufacturing could be moved back here (in fact some companies are doing that already). Turns out the "savings" from outsourcing, in the long run, led to unintended consequences which at least partially offset those savings.
Returning the manufacturing to the U.S. is not as short-term profitable as many companies would like,
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Laying waste to domestic industry is a whole hell of a lot cheaper and faster to do than [re-]building domestic industry.
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To move manufacturing requires you to either build a factory or find one with spare capacity, then you have to fit out that factory to do what you need to do, train the staff to make it with suffuicant reliability and so-on. For any non-trivial product this takes time, especially if lots of people are doing it at once and in the event of a country dropping off the supply map you would have to think about not only your factories but those of your suppliers and your suppliers' suppliers and so-on.
For beter or
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USA and USAF, welcome to the real world where you pay to play.
Congress (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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You don't give it to NASA. You give it to 'protecting the American way of life'. The contract goes to YoYoDyne^HBoeing. NASA then 'needs' a heavy lift booster that YoYoDyne just happens to have tested recently.....
With the exception of the Saturn boosters (the 1B and V), every US space launch has been done with a booster that is to a greater or lesser extent, military.
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I can only assume you're using some convoluted definition of "US space launch" that excludes all the ones that SpaceX has flown, whether for the government or not. Because I can't even imagine how you'd manage to call the Falcon/Dragon stack "military".
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The Tea Party loves folks like SpaceX. NASA is all politics and earmarks anyway. (And climate "science" is more politics and earmarks than science right now, but that a different topic).
Re:Congress (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Choice of vendor (Score:3)
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...
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you're not - you're buying the engines.
Re: Choice of vendor (Score:2)
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Falcon9Heavy.... http://www.spacex.com/falcon-h... [spacex.com]
Hasn't flown yet, but if it does redundancy and has as many fail-safes as the current Falcon9, I bet it will do well...
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I believe it's just "Falcon Heavy", since if it was numbered for the same reason the Falcon 9 is, it would be the Falcon 27 (or possibly the Falcon 9 3). But yes. The basic design is, I believe, complete... they're just having some trouble with the propellant cross-feed (where the side fuel tanks are used up first by all 27 rockets, allowing the side boosters and their 18 rockets to be dropped after their tanks are used up, while the central one booster and its 9 rockets still have a full supply). Currentl
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Documentary on the engines (Score:5, Informative)
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?... [youtube.com]
Dependent on Russia, China.... (Score:2)
No more shuttle so we could save a trivial amount of tax money. We've shipped our manufacturing to China to make more money for CEOs and upper management who can live anywhere and could give a rat's ass about the USA.
Gee, I wonder where that could all end? Any ideas?
I'm a bit surprised. (Score:2)
I'm a bit surprised that they still use the RD-180 engine, I thought that it had a successor by now. It's after all 70s/80's technology.
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Well - I thought more about an upgraded/updated version with a bit more power, not a giant leap forward! :)
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Well, technically the fuels (~200k) and the rechecking/recertifying (unknown, hopefully not much) will prevent it from being actually zero-cost, but it'll be a pittance compared to current prices.
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I suspect that safety inspections alone will run you far more than 200k. Then there's the fact that some parts cannot be reused and will be single-fire only, unless they want to build a rocket that keeps its entire structure throughout the flight, which sounds extremely wasteful. There's a reason why most modern rockets have several stages, all designed for specific part of the flight.
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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 secti
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Just because they're reusable doesn't mean they're reusable forever. It wouldn't surprise me if by "reusable" they mean "we can launch them about four or five times before they wear out, with a lot of maintenance in between. Assuming they don't come back down on a granite mountain or something."
Back in the 70s, they spent a hell of a lot of time twaddling with the rockets before launching them.
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I hope so but I remember that was the way the shuttle was sold and it turned out to cost about a billion per flight in the end.
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Yeah.. but the shuttle had the gummint butting in.. all of CONgress making sure their home turf got a piece of the shuttle "pie".... In the case of SpaceX, its Musk and his stockholders.. and I'm not even sure how many "stockholders" SpaceX has, as I'm pretty sure its not a publicly traded company.... If ANYbody can do what he claims to be planning, I bet Musk can...
'
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FTFY, just so you kids get some context.
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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
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So what you are saying is that it is fine for say China (sorry Chinese people) to migrate a few hundred thousand, or even millions of its people into neighbor regions of neighbor countries, and then annex those territories because majority of the populace are Chinese? Then do the same again, and again, and again... Did you hear that Chinese government, get to it NOW!
Well, I can think of another country that famously does this, but I don't want to stir up that shit-storm...
But your description isn't too terr
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ad 1, possibly. So? (see next point.)
ad 2, the point is that once people started realizing that the newly formed "government" is going to abolish Russian as a language and treat the majority of the people of Crimea as if they were a small minority, the sentiments changed abruptly.
ad 3, a,b: what's your point again?
ad 3 c: Yes, see point 2. The putschist government did exactly that acting illegal and without consent of the people.
ad 4: First, it's Bandera, not banderol. Second, they came to secure their as
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A few months back I was watching a documentary where a bunch of Ukrainians were also calling it "the Ukraine".
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Oh yeah...
Due in part in retaliation for economic sanctions that were enacted in parallel to the NATO expansion to the Ukraine due to Russia invading Crimea under a flimsy legal pretense to secure their black sea port, Russia announced that it would no longer sell its own RD-180 rocket engines for American military launches.
Added just a little more context.
I'm sure we could do this all day-- the russian entanglement goes back to 1783 when Catherine the Great defeated the existin
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You colours are shining through. If you're going to be a long term about it, don't be an asshole and cherrypick - go all the way back to Kiovan Rus, and then to the history of said Khanate, which was basically about Tatar conquerors being dumped by retreating Mongols of Mongol-Tatar yoke and some of them saw Ottomans raping and slaving Slavic nations of the Northern Black Sea, so they moved there to help.
Defeat of Ottomans was a combined effort that galvanised Russian-Ukrainian alliance back then.
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Re:Yawn (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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NATO expanding means NATO troops/infrastructure there. You're thinking just the obvious, but that's what CNN/BBC writers like glossing over, yadda yadda yadda.
According to a Russian news agency, this is not happening either: "NATO has no plans to deploy troops on the territory of Ukraine" [itar-tass.com]. This was one of the first links that came up when I Googled for "nato troops ukraine".
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And there are WMDs in Iraq and no one's planning an invasion there. Sure think, Chekov!
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And there are WMDs in Iraq and no one's planning an invasion there. Sure think, Chekov!
Iraq is a good point of comparison: the US perceived a security threat where none existed - or at least not enough of one to be worth thousands of lives and trillions of dollars - and rushed to invade in the face of international condemnation, while making absurd claims about "liberating" the Iraqi people. We are still dealing with the fallout from that disaster, obviously. Putin has now invaded a sovereign nation under
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Difficult to put it in US terms, but imagine, if the Canadian government would decide to revoke the official status of the French language (or the other way around); I guess they'd be pretty fucking pissed as well.
Georgia is a whole different story altogether: South Ossetia "declared independence from Georgia in 1990" [wikipedia.org] and Apsny/Abhazia is similar.
The point is that if an ethnic majority of a region wants independence, they should be able to att
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always pretend to be blind to the reasons for which they are hated, and only see the hate and point at it. Come to think of it... I seem to remember there is a group of people who always did that... who were they?
Russians?
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In case you are not up on not so current events, the last attack on the US was executed by a few guys with box cutters and multitools.
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and only because our federal agencies were watching those Saudis to see what they'd do. well, we saw what they did.
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Proven technology - not necessarily superior.
that said military thinking prized proven above all else... so your point is valid until proven otherwise.
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Why don't the US just take the RD-180, tear it to bits, reverse engineer it and build a direct clone locally?
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And you think that they haven't done it by now?
Re:Russians have better engines (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: Russians have better engines (Score:2)
the reason why l-mart executives chose Russian engines was pure costs against Boeing.
now ula has lost nearly everything except for us gov launches, all because they are subsidizing Russian space program.
However, musk has not focused on the best specs, nor just 1 customer. They are focused on being the cheapest and safest launch vehicle in the world. That is nearly
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You are making one HUGE mistake in your rant.
Russian engines are not cheaper. They are BETTER. Much better. So much better that Lockheed Martin engineers did not believe the specs they were presented when they were told about the engines and would not believe them until they test fired one engine in their own testing facility.
It wasn't even a generational gap. It was a technology that was deemed "impossible to build" by US rocket engineers.
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Heh, even Glushko (the constructor of RD-170) himself couldn't believe that it was possible, that was the reason for the conflict with Korolyov. So Korolyov gave the engine development to an airplane engine designer who didn't know that it was impossible and NK-33 came out of this.
Re: Sorry but no. LA Times fell for a PR scam (Score:2)