Posted on 09/02/2014 6:48:34 PM PDT by maggief
The rising tensions with Russia over its aggression in Ukraine is creating national security concerns inside the Pentagon, where the military’s largest satellite program is reliant on a rocket engine produced by Moscow.
The Air Force said it has begun looking for alternatives to the RD-180 rocket engines for its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program — the fourth largest line item in the U.S. defense budget — now that Russia has threatened to cut off the technology in its tit-for-tat struggle with the U.S.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
“The reset worked,” Clinton said. “It was an effort to try to obtain Russian cooperation on key objectives while Medvedev was president, and of course Putin still pulled the strings but he gave Medvedev a certain amount of independence to negotiate, number one, a new arms control treaty which was absolutely necessary.”
And there’s Blue Origin, which, I believe, has had some trouble, but they are funded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, so that might help them stay in the game long enough to work the kinks out.
Micheals
has t
em estes d motors
It needs to be a company owned by lesbian Muslims in order to get the contract.
great... but it’s going to take a lot of those
I think I am afraid of heights now.
That is an amazing photo!
A better question might be who’s idea was it to put the concerns of a corrupt bankrupt East European nation ahead of American national security?
I agree. Wheels would be good.
I oppose the stupid sanctions, Ukraine needs weapons send them weapons.
The idiots in Washington will probably have China make them now. At least NASA can tell us what the weather will be in a hundred years, or not.
i.e.- on Russian engines.
Their Germans were more successful than ours in developing reliable cheap kerosene/LOX rocket engines.
There is a HUGE irony, if that word is appropriate here: The ‘miscreants’ you refer to are all working in cahoots on an agenda that in many, if not almost all, ways is in violation of multiple laws and are somehow keeping on the same page.
The ‘irony’ is that despite the public circus over emails, hard drives & blackberries, the NSA has all the evidence needed to make the case for a multi-agency conspiracy to undermine the Constitution...
One can only come to a single conclusion in the wake of that and suddenly using ‘generation(s)’ vs. ‘decades’ becomes much, much more morose.
Well maybe that’s one good thing to come out of this Ukrainian crisis is that maybe we don’t get reliant on another country for our strategic needs.
Take one of the existing RD-180 rocket engines to Boeing or Lockheed or both.
Attach a Request For Proposal:
Provide a price for building 10 of these, PO to follow in 3 months to the successful bidder
“... the raw materials have to be imported then what difference does that make I guess.”
The US has no physical lack of those items, rather the domestic sources were shut down during the Clinton admin to satisfy the environmentalists and Chinese donors to his reelection campaign - one rare earth mine was even turned into a national wilderness. Low sulfur coal mines were also shut down to satisfy an Indonesian Clinton donor.
Obama is continuing Clinton’s march of the US into the third world of poverty, ignorance, desperation, dependance, and internal turmoil ...
Ya think?
We are so screwed!
I’m not talking about sanctions genius, I’m talking about the brain-dead politics of siding with a corrupt deadbeat east European kleptocracy at the expense of a much more important strategic relationship.
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