where did the idea of buying rocket engines from Russia come from anyways?
Liberals!
President Reagan invited America’s friends and allies to join the program, which was called “Space Station Freedom.” NASA, moving at the speed of government, had accomplished nothing other than a set of design studies by 1993, when Bill Clinton was inaugurated. Under pressure from the New York Times, which was on a jihad against so-called “big science,” Clinton canceled the Superconducting Super Collider, which was then being built in Texas, and he nearly canceled the space station.
But with his usual sharp political instincts, President Clinton realized the space program had more supporters than particle physics, and that, in any case, he didn’t have much to fear from the physicists: They would, on the whole, burn Isaac Newtons’ and Albert Einsteins’ collected works in a bonfire in Harvard Yard before they would vote Republican. So he killed their program and kept NASA’s space station. At the same time, in order to satisfy his liberal base, he recast the space station as “outreach” to Russia.
(snip)
America’s space engagement with Russia has been, like so many other foreign-policy initiatives, beset by wishful thinking and by the desire to ignore the hard facts of power politics. No party or faction in Washington comes out of this looking good: not the George H. W. Bush realists who made Moscow’s space program dependent on U.S. funds; not the policymakers from the Clinton and Bush II eras, who embedded Russia into the ISS and the EELV programs; and certainly not the current administration, which seems to be even more lost in space than its predecessors.
When they fired all the real rocket scientists. /s
Seriously, though...is it any wonder after they started producing climate change data/animations ala CIA ‘zoom-climb’ (aka ‘propaganda’)?
It’ll take decades to reverse the damage left in it’s wake (it = puppet/minions/RATS/Libs/progs)...and I’m referring to far more than just NASA...
I have no idea where the idea came from but I want to know what happened to the idea all US Military items should come from domestic sources. Even if foreign design and companies they should be made in and supplies by US factories.
In case of something like this, we just take over the factories.
But as someone else pointed out, if the raw materials have to be imported then what difference does that make I guess.
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?
Their Germans were more successful than ours in developing reliable cheap kerosene/LOX rocket engines.