How Russia could strangle the US space program

Global Post.com ^ | Mar 25, 2014 | Jean MacKenzie

[KeyLargo]

How Russia could strangle the US space program

Jean MacKenzie

If you use a cellphone, have a GPS system in your car, or get cash from ATMs, you should be worried.

BUZZARDS BAY, Mass. — Think Russia has no way to put pressure on the United States? Think again.

The US relies heavily on Russia to furnish the engines that power rockets that deliver both military and civil payloads into space.

This includes GPS systems in cars and cellphones, and even systems that allow ATMs to function. Weather satellites are launched into space via Russian-powered rockets, and military systems such as early missile detection also depend on our friends in Moscow.

In addition, since NASA scrapped the space shuttle program in 2011, the US has to rely on Russian Soyuz capsules to get its astronauts to the space station and to bring them back home.

As the crisis over Crimea deepens and tit-for-tat sanctions go into effect, conventional wisdom has held that the US is holding all the cards. Given the relatively small amount of trade the US conducts with Russia each year, and its pre-eminent position as the world’s largest economy, Washington has projected confidence as it moves to isolate Moscow diplomatically and economically.

But Russia is unlikely to take it lying down. As Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, warned in a talk at Harvard recently, “They have ways of responding [to sanctions] that … we’re not going to like.”

One of the things Americans may dislike very much indeed is a possible ban on the sale of RD-180 engines to the US under a contract with Russian manufacturer

The RD-180 powers the Atlas V rocket, the main launch vehicle used to get US military and civil payloads into space.

[TwelveOfTwenty]

Too late . . . Ocommie already has.

Does anybody out there still think Romney would have been worse?

[ClearCase_guy]

John McCain probably think so. He hates those conservative Republicans!

[free-in-nyc]

"In November 2007, the Obama presidential campaign released a policy document delaying NASA’s Constellation program by five years to fund education programs."

The hard left has hated the U.S. space program since the 1960's - they always said that money spent on space exploration should be re-allocated to some government program that would allegedly "help the poor." Therefore the destruction of the American space program was a completely predictable result of the election of Obama, who is a protege of Bill Ayers and other 60's radicals.

[SunkenCiv]

The RD-180 is a very efficient “kerosene-burning” engine; like all the world’s space programs, it grew out of Von Braun’s V-2 engine. The bio of Sergei Korolev includes a nice b&w photo of Korolev standing next to a captured V-2 engine. The Soviets copied and back-engineered that design, continuing to refine it, and any liquid-fueled rocket engines based on Soviet designs also descend from the V-2.

The RD-170 was four engines joined together and using common turbopump and gimballing, but (surprise surprise) often claimed to be the most powerful liquid fueled engine. It isn’t. The single bell F-1 is just under four times as powerful as the four-engined RD-170 design.

The RD-180 descends from the RD-170, and isn’t as powerful, but same layout, multiple engines joined to a single turbopump and gimballing.

Orbital Sciences (not Blue Origin) uses the NK-33, which is an archival Soviet product, the most efficient kerosene burner ever produced there.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Day late and a dollar short. Ubama already did that.

[SunkenCiv]

/bingo

[Cyman]

Putin can annex the ISS

[ansel12]

Romney is a “conservative republican”?

[dforest]

Space program? I thought it was now a Muslim outreach program.

[Star Traveler]

There’s the problem with integrating with your ENEMIES!

[publius911]

Obama trashed NASA beginning with killing any actual way for astronauts to get to orbit by shutting down the Space Shuttle and then trashing a replacement vehicle. This is kind of a problem because without a space vehicle, NASA is not a space agency. It’s a bunch of rooms full of people with computers.

Not exactly.
They have thousands of people with nothing to do.
So they are inventing useless irrelevant crap to do. Like this one...

NASA Makework Useless Krap

[Red White and Blue patriot]

I was just about to ask that, too. Regardless, both McCain and Romney would be better in the White House than the Clown-in-Chief.

[KeyLargo]

Snag delays arrival of crew at space station
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Mar 26, 7:14 AM (ET)

By NATALIYA VASILYEVA

MOSCOW (AP) - An engine snag has delayed the arrival of a Russian spacecraft carrying three astronauts to the International Space Station until Thursday.

A rocket carrying Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev and American Steve Swanson to the space station blasted off successfully early Wednesday from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20140326/DACPBD4G1.html