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.
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]
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: 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.
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: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.
Re: thankX (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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.