Posted on 05/29/2016 7:58:54 AM PDT by rktman
The outcome of dueling versions of the National Defense Authorization Act could determine how much the U.S. lines Russia's pockets before what some lawmakers hope is a speedy transition to a domestically produced rocket engine.
The RD-180 engine is built by NPO Energomash, a manufacturer mostly owned by the Russian Federation. It's used in the Atlas V rocket, built by Lockheed Martin and Boeing's United Launch Alliance.
The House version of the NDAA approves all of the 18 requested engines. In the Senate, where there has been a lengthy battle over buying from Russia, the NDAA authorizes nine engines.
Either way, the Kremlin's defense industrial complex stands to gain a quarter billion to half a billion taxpayer dollars. Add that to the billion they've already made from RD-180 engine sales to the U.S. And add on top of that questions about how much is directly going to individuals sanctioned after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and occupation of Crimea.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Yeah, I do know that we have some engines built here. But cost seems to be a driving force as usual.
US motors cannot lift as much, are not as reliable, and cost more.
The upcoming Russian Fenix generation of super heavy lift motors surpass all current and future US motors - public and private.
Oh, boo hoo, since when did the Russians force the US to design and build inferior rocket engines and upgrade them to even worse designs.
The US COULD have designed and built equivalent engines if they had the will and effort.
Instead they chose to build a NASA outreach engine to the Muslim horde. That's the engine that's needed to move the Muslim to America.
SpaceX has been certified recently to launch military payloads, and their Falcon Heavy is going to have its first launch this year. Blue Origin is working on a replacement engine for the Russian engines. Dragon 2.0 is making progress towards launching humans to the ISS. Americans are making steady progress to where we don’t need the Russian engines anymore.
Reminds me of the lag between the Apollo program the the Shuttle. Not that big a gap. What’s in the future? The last shuttle landed late July 2011 and we still aren’t close to having a human rated launch vehicle. Orion has done test flight but I don’t know that it’s rated to carry people yet. Even at that we’re returning to the past with ocean splash downs. WTH? No goal to be seen in the near future. I read the launch may slip out to 2023.
Ain’t globalism and offshoring grand. Plenty of freepers keep assuring us that America doesn’t need to manufacture anything.
LOL! We got peeps to make stuff for us.
As of last week, SpaceX still planned on a late-2016 launch for its Falcon Heavy, which will exceed the payload to orbit of all boosters ever made apart from the Saturn V. SpaceX already has a lower price per pound to orbit than anyone (including the Chinese), and the reusability of their Falcon 9 booster hasn't even become a regular occurrence yet. The supposed next-gen Russian engines, like the RD series, will be mere further refinements of Von Braun's V2 engines, captured at the end of WWII, they won't be able to touch SpaceX on cost. Blue Origin's upsized engine now in development will (like future SpaceX engines) be methane-burning, and reusable -- but they haven't shown an ability to match price per pound to orbit.
Russia dissolves its federal space agency, what now?
Tomasz Nowakowski
December 30th, 2015
[renationalized everything under one autocracy]
http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/organizations/roscosmos/russia-dissolves-federal-space-agency-now/
There are no such engines — they plan to upgrade the RD-171 (a dual-gimbal four-engine cluster often erroneously claimed to be a single engine) to be a methane-burner. Before the end of Roscosmos, development was estimated to *start* in 2018.
The RD-171 is the basis, not an upgrade, for the new design.
New Fenix medium rocket still fits in cost cutting budget of Roscosmos
Russian space agency retains plans for creating Fenix rocket.
"Fenix is part and parcel of a product research and development portfolio, its eventual aim being creation of a new space rocket for manned programs. The Zenit-size rocket may be built according to a modular principle and consist of several modules. A super-heavy configuration is a possibility."
And they aren’t new engines, merely upgrades; part of the pretext for the renationalization have been launch failures. Historically, when there’s some kind of negative publicity, or some new development in the US or somewhere else outside the old USSR, the Russian response is to make (or repeat, or embellish) extravagant claims. They aren’t going to pan out.
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