This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
Commercialization

Russian Rocket Engines In Many Critical Paths

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 21, 2014
Filed under , , , , , ,

A Win-Win Sanction – It’s past time for the nation that won the space race to get back in the business, National Review Online
“Russia may retaliate by cutting off our supply of RD-180 engines. Imported Russian RD-180s power the first stage of the American Atlas V rocket; the Atlas V launches our military satellites. If Putin does threaten our rocket shipments, we can dip into the two-year store that has been stockpiled for just such an occasion — and two weeks ago, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk testified to Congress that his American-made Falcon rockets are ready to take over (for about $300 million less per flight than an Atlas launch costs taxpayers now).”
Orbital Drops Antitrust Lawsuit Against ULA, Space News
“Orbital is considering the RD-180 as a replacement for the AJ-26 engines that power the main stage of the company’s Antares medium-lift rocket. Each Antares rocket uses two AJ-26 engines, which are actually Soviet-vintage NK-33 engines refurbished by Aerojet Rocketdyne of Sacramento, Calif. Orbital has secured only enough AJ-26 engines for the eight cargo-delivery missions to the international space station the company owes NASA through 2016 under a $1.89 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract signed in 2008.”
Keith’s note: Wouldn’t it be prudent to start building Americanized versions of these engines – or develop home grown designs?

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

67 responses to “Russian Rocket Engines In Many Critical Paths”

  1. Dewey Vanderhoff says:
    0
    0

    There is an even more salient aspect of this despicable situation. The American engine builder Pratt & Whitney merged with Rocketdyne in 2005 then Aerojet later to become America’s only large rocket engine builder not named SpaceX). On behalf of Lockheed Martin ( builder of the Atlas V booster ) and ULA launch consortium , PW Rocketdyne has refurbed RD-180s for over a decade. Paid $ 1 billion to purchase 101 RD-180’s from NPO-Energomash back c. 2001. It has in fact tried to build an RD-180 engine
    domestically from scratch . P&W Rocketdyne got a license from AMROSS back in 2009 to do it . The new engine was supposed to first fly on a military launch scheduled for 2012.

    THAT never happened.

    I’d like to know the reason why they couldn’t deliver a flyable engine. The American techs could either not adequately fabricate the engine at all , or more likely not do so affordably . My own working theory goes back to something I heard from a Rocketdyne engineer working on the RS-68 hydrogen engine many years ago in
    California…that the US had never gotten nearly as good at metallurgy and metal fabrication as the Russians. The Russians could do more with alloys and machining. In other words, fabrication. We Americans could design better stuff, but the Russians could build better stuff; using more robust metal which allowed them to make the engine simpler, but stronger . We could not
    replicate their essential fabrication technology in attempting our
    domestic RD-180 .

    So—-why no American made RD-180 yet , at any price ?

    Please investigate this further. I think it is crucial. It is rocket science, after all.
    *
    *
    *

    ( p.s. Disqus comment system is misbehaving this morning, for me anyway. )

    • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
      0
      0

      there’s a fascinating documentary (I think this is it: http://youtu.be/MZnYr94aa9E ) about how we got some of the NK-33 engines from Russia.

      they mention that while in the USA, the designers design something and then the metal workers follow the design, in Russia, the designers gave the metal workers their design and then the metal workers modified it into what they could actually build. so designing and building was a collaborative process, rather than a one way street. that may be part of it.

      as for why they never built their own version of it, probably the necessary equipment for manufacturing them was probably determined to be more expensive than just buying more from Russia.

      • Rocky J says:
        0
        0

        One thing to take from this British documentary is that making a program dependent on a single individual, such as Korolyov was, is very risky. I think the future of Falcon 9 and even Falcon Heavy is set but the longer terms goals of SpaceX – going to Mars, are hanging on one individual, Elon Musk. He has surrounded himself with like-minded executives but who knows what they would really do without Musk. I think one of the keys to going to Mars is Musk’s intention to withhold SpaceX from an IPO. Once owned by shareholders, the grand objectives of going to Mars could be scaled back. Musk is critical to keep his and SpaceX goals on track.

        • Michael Spencer says:
          0
          0

          Fair points. I’d add that much the same was said about Apple and Steve Jobs.
          And don’t fear an IPO for SpaceX, While not desirable for some reasons other than you show, American companies have very wide latitude. The recent scuffle with a disgruntled shareholder and Tim Cook is one example, but there are many others. Those big shots in American companies are expected to lead and they are given wide latitude to do so. Until they fail, of course.

          • Rocky J says:
            0
            0

            Musk chooses to delay an IPO until after he establishes an operational Mars Colonial Transport (MCT) functioning within the framework of a profitable corporation. SpaceX’s market value will have MCT integrated into revenues and expenditures. Investors will effectively be buying into MCT, and everything else. Nothing would stop new shareholders from immediately calling for termination of MCT but its much less likely than if he called for and suddenly ramped up the MCT project after the IPO, taking a considerable margin of profit to do so.

    • Henry Vanderbilt says:
      0
      0

      You point out part of the reason already – ULA is getting a smoking deal on RD-180s from Russia. It is a complex tight-tolerance piece of machinery, using some very advanced metals and materials, in low-rate production.

      ~$10m each (plus I’d assume some P&W markup) is a huge bargain by US aerospace standards. EG, SSME, of comparable complexity, cost five to ten times that (depending on when you bought and still how you do the accounting) and RS-168 (a considerably simpler engine) costs twice that.

      My understanding is that P&W-R did eventually work out how they might duplicate the various Russian manufacturing processes involved, but at that point it became clear that US-built RD-180s would cost several times as much as the current contract batch of Russian-built.

      So, politics might soon force us to build the RD-180 here, but it’ll cost a lot more. We won’t likely do it unless forced.

      Politics aside, one wild card to watch is what happens when the current contract batch of Russian-built is done – the price will go up at that point, likely to just short of whatever the Russians think will provoke us into building our own.

      • Anonymous says:
        0
        0

        10million each. Thats the first time I ever see a number for this. Do you have a reference or source link?

        • Henry Vanderbilt says:
          0
          0

          Dewdle’s lead-off post: “PW Rocketdyne has refurbed RD-180s for over a decade. Paid $ 1 billion to purchase 101 RD-180’s from NPO-Energomash back c. 2001.” $1 billion/101 = ~$9.9 million each.

          Beyond that, I don’t have any source I can cite either. But that cost plus some P&W markup certainly fits my understanding of the situation.

          Hey, Dewdle – can you say anything about where you saw those numbers?

          • patb2009 says:
            0
            0

            http://www.wired.com/wired/

            “This engine cost $10 million and produces almost 1 million pounds of thrust. You can’t do that with an American-made engine.”

          • Anonymous says:
            0
            0

            Now if the RD180 engines are so cheap, why are Atlas’s so expensive? Point being, using the cheapness of an engine of a very expensive rocket as a selling point is a bit like telling a customer how cheap the supplies (engine, transmission, dash, etc) were to build a very expensive, unaffordable car.

          • Henry Vanderbilt says:
            0
            0

            Atlas 5 (And Delta 4) cost what they cost because they were designed and are manufactured within the traditional US government aerospace procurement and supplier system.

            (This is the system I earlier mentioned my old cost rule-of-thumb for: 3 to 10 times more expensive than pure private projects, depending on who’s buying, USAF or NASA. The rule-of thumb is now more like 5 to 15 times pure private costs, BTW, FWIW, in part because SpaceX is moving the private-venture cost bar downward and in part because the traditional system is getting worse.)

            They met their original requirement just fine – the two EELV designs were somewhat cheaper, and far more responsive to non-NASA USG customers, than launching on Shuttle.

            (Part of this responsiveness, BTW, was building the systems to support a much higher launch rate at need. Maintaining this capacity for USG emergencies is a significant part of the ongoing higher cost of the ULA operation.)

            Two things have happened since.

            1) The traditional US aerospace procurement ecosystem is imploding. The overall market for its products is static or shrinking. The network of component suppliers willing and able to meet USG QA paperwork is reacting to this shrinking market by raising prices drastically to their few remaining must-have-it customers.

            Prominent among these must-have-its is ULA. The price of RD-180 is steady – for now. The price of many if not most other components ULA is locked into is skyrocketing. Thus ULA’s prices rise also.

            ULA is aware of this problem and if you look you can see signs they’re working on it. But that takes time, and as long as their chief customer is USG and they have to continue to work within the USG procurement system, their options are very limited.

            2) Meanwhile, SpaceX (and potentially OSC, if they can expand their access to cheap engines) is moving the bar of what seems a reasonable cost for a launch downward, fast.

          • dogstar29 says:
            0
            0

            One good reason Musk wanted to make everything in-house.

          • Anonymous says:
            0
            0

            I suspect one American made engine could, but as just a guesstimate-the Merlin engines on the Falcon 9. Backtracking from prices on Falcon 9’s, it would not be surprising that if SpaceX ever decided to sell the Merlin’s on the market, that the price would be less than $1M each, meaning less than $10 per pound of thrust.

          • Dewey Vanderhoff says:
            0
            0

            Got that from a Wikipedia article specific to the RD-AMROSS consortium… the alliance between Pratt & Whitney-Rocketdyne and NPO Energomash.
            http://en.wikipedia.org/wik

            You might also find a complementary WP article specific to the RD-180 engine itself to be enlightening.
            http://en.wikipedia.org/wik

            – and this at Mark Wades Encyclopedia Astronautica:
            http://www.astronautix.com/

            If I read these correctly , it was NASA that decided to forego using the Russian RD-180 extensively going forward and suggested the US develop a new engine from the ground up that met or exceeded the RD-180 in performance. As has been pointed out, the Russians are selling those engines for a fraction of the cost of any American-made substitute. $ 10 million per engine apparently is quite cheap.

            Oh by the way , the RD-180 is a derivative of the earlier, much larger RD-170/171 that powers the Zenit sea launch vehicle ( and drove the giant Energia booster of the Soviet shuttle program) . The RD-171 has four combustion chambers and four nozzles and produces more thrust than the Saturn V’s mighty F-1 engine. The RD-180 halves all that : two chambers and two nozzles. Since the Zenit booster is built in the Ukraine using those Russian engines, it will be interesting to watch the geopolitics of THAT relationship in the coming months , given recent events in that part of the world… and Sea Launch’s economic vulnerability.

          • Henry Vanderbilt says:
            0
            0

            Thanks! Yes, good points on RD-180’s RD-170 derivation, and on potential Ukrainian supply problems for Zenit/Sea Launch there.

            With luck, economic sanity will prevail all around – Russia’s economy has problems too, and they need the money they get selling rocket engines.

            Mind, my experience has been that sanity and common sense is seldom the way to bet in major space policy decisions.

    • Apollo100 says:
      0
      0

      Wow….You do not have any of your facts straight. Rocketdyne/PW/Aerojet was never given a contract to build and test an “american built” RD-180, nor did it try on company funds.
      It may also do you some benefit to look into the “metallurgy” of the Russian engines and the American engines. The Russians are way behind the US state of the art, they just accept a higher level of risk.
      Russian engines are low cost because the workers are paid in rubles and they are heavily subsudized (by Russian stanards).

      • Dewey Vanderhoff says:
        0
        0

        You are mistaken, Apollo. All the engineering documentation and a license to build RD-180’s stateside was definitely given to P & R- Rocketdyne, and of course they already had engines to reverse engineer. That is well established. What I do not knowis if P & R-R ever got around to cutting metal for a scratch engine , but they could have and maybe should have. Perhaps their beancounters decided it could not be done for anywhere near the price of a Russian import. I also have anecdotal evidence that NASA itself had decided to forego using any Russian engines on any new American boosters and thus no domestic RD-180’s were considered. What we got instead were recycled SSME’s and a derivative of shuttle engines known as the RS-84 intended for nonreusable one-shot flights. Dunno where we are at with the RS-84 these days…

        • Apollo100 says:
          0
          0

          Dewdle, thanks for the reply…..Are you CERTAIN that P&W received ALL of the documentaion (drawings, specs, test procedures, etc…) required to build an RD-180 and got a CONTRACT to build such engine? Emphasis on engine vs part….
          Clarification on the RS-84…it was designed as a highly reusable engine.
          A reply to vulture4….The Russians do have some impressive coating technologies. Three questions for you. 1) How reliable are coatings in these high heat flux environments, 2) What happens when said coating spalls off of these Russian base alloys in a mod-high temp, high pressure GOX rich environment, and 3) What is the status of the US efforts to develop high strength alloys that do not burn in similar environments?

          • dogstar29 says:
            0
            0

            AIUI the most challanging part is the oxygen-rich mixture used in the RD-180 preburner (as opposed to the fuel-rich preburner mixture used in the SSME). Running oxygen-rich reduces the coking problem but makes the hot flames vastly more corrosive for the ducting and turbine blades, and the complex injector required for staged combustion. As you suggest, I don’t know of any comparable capability in the US and you can’t get it from drawings and specs. Building such components is not just an art and science, it is a craft. I do not know how long the RD-180 can burn before overhaul but I suspect it is capable of reuse.

          • savuporo says:
            0
            0

            Maybe someone should be looking at importing the original designers (or craftsmen ), not the engines or engine designs.

          • dogstar29 says:
            0
            0

            An excellent idea, but the way things are now I suspect Putin would have something to say about that.

    • dogstar29 says:
      0
      0

      Yes, I agree completely. When I was in college decades ago my metallury instructor said that Russia was ahead in the field, partly because few Americans could or bothered to read Russian journals. The metallurgy and particularly coating processes for components of the engine are critical and may not be fully described in the documentation. So yes, we’re stuck.

    • Rocky J says:
      0
      0

      The two stories referenced are different discussions. The National Review article discusses politics. The Space News is just reporting a news event. We know there is a connection though. Orbital contracting for RD-180s means more dependency on the Russian supply chain. My big concern is that ULA (Lockheed-Martin & Boeing) will use political pressure to force the American taxpayer to pay for the cost of manufacturing the RD-180 in the United States. So long as things have been rosy, Lockheed-Martin (ULA) has been unwilling to ante up the funds to manufacture RD-180s here. There are apparently technical issues and likely these can be overcome but the cost has been prohibitive. Why should America be screwed by American corporations because they were unwilling to invest in technology themselves? These older American firms do show their age, their unwillingness to innovate and choose easy profit margins instead. We should not pay for this. What we have in SpaceX is true American ingenuity that NASA and the DOD needs to really support. ULA will screw the American tax payer to free us from Russian dependency while SpaceX is offering clear American made alternatives developed primarily with their own privately raised funds.

      Regarding Aerojet (-Pratt & Witney Rocketdyne), there is consolidation going on in the industry. SpaceX’s disruptive technology, lowering of launch costs, is likely to cause more consolidation, some being failure of companies and buyouts by bigger players. I would not be surprised to see Sierra Nevada purchased by Boeing to acquire Dream Chaser among many other S-N technologies. Space Systems Loral is now owned by the Canadian corporation MacDonald Dettwiler (MDA). It is hard to say if Orbital Sciences will survive. They have survived this long as a 2nd tier launch provider, who knows.

  2. DTARS says:
    0
    0

    I know little about these engines other than they are very dependable. Like Merlin it runs on RP-1.

    Well are we not entering the age of the reuseable rocket? How many relights can the RD-180 do safely? Merlin does about 25

    Isn’t one the main reasons Musk is running rapter on methane because methane runs. Cleaner/ no coking to clug engine parts therefore more relights, with less maintenance/ CHEAPER!

    So why would anyone waste money copying an engine that can’t compete with methane engines?

    No wonder we are still stuck on earth 40 plus years after apollo

    Seems our rocket science is asleep for affordable rockets.

    http://en.m.wikipedia.org/w

    In the wikipedia specs here I see nothing about number of relights tested to.

    Why not? Isn’t that the most important performance info for rocket engines?

    • Rocky J says:
      0
      0

      The new demand for RD-180s could be the final straw needed to get RD-180s built in the US. The big problem I see is that the American taxpayer will foot the development bill. ULA (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) claim that performance (processing) and reliability trump cost, that is, despite costing 2x more than Falcon 9 (soon Falcon Heavy), they are the better choice. This will not stand for long but the risk to NASA and taxpayers is that they will weasel out funds from government to pay for the development of RD-180 manufacturing in the USA. They will cry that yes, we are at risk of Russian sanctions and by the way, there is more demand for RD-180s. We need to be careful that big corporations such as the ones mentioned here do not lobby and rip off us and the young companies and technologists that are showing America new innovation.

      • DTARS says:
        0
        0

        I work around diesel engines all the time. When I was a kid the exhaust was terrible, soot. The fix was to change clean the fuel. Now it is much cleaner hopefully safer to be around.

        Can the same be done with RP-1 or is Musks use of methane the only practical choice the the future of reusable Rocket engines???

        If so Spacex only gets farther ahead in the NEW SPACE RACE while others shoot themselves in the foot trying to rip us off.

        • Rocky J says:
          0
          0

          The difference between your dad’s diesel engine and the RP-1 rocket engines is temperature and pressure. The efficiency of combustion of RP-1 is around 70% in comparison to the 20% of the internal combustion engine. There is soot problems for reusable RP-1 engines and the exhaust likely consists of hydrocarbons that are deleterious to the upper atmosphere particularly the Ozone layer. If rocket flight were to increase 10-fold, it might pose a problem to the Ozone layer. The article in nasaspaceflight.com on SpaceX latest news on the Raptor describes the advantages of liquid methane. Additionally, another bird that is stoned by perfecting liquid methane engines now is an engine that can burn fuel derived through simple processes on the surface of Mars. I would think liquid methane/ LOX rockets probably do produce less soot and likely do not smell like an old diesel. By the way, my father owned a service station at Slauson and Alameda in LA for over 30 years. I worked there starting at age 11. It was great but it is time to end the use of internal combustion engines in favor of electric. Rockets and aircraft will remain exceptions for a while.

  3. Jeff Havens says:
    0
    0

    Slightly novice question — is there any payload currently on the Launch Schedule that cannot be switched over to Delta IV or IV-H, or to Falcon 9/9-H? If so, save the engines for those payloads and start the work to move everything else.

    I say, ramp up production of Delta IV common cores, retire Atlas V after all the RD-180’s are used, and start design/development of Atlas VI using an American engine(s). All this fuss about about trying to reproduce the RD-180 here is folly. America does not copy, it designs!

    The title of the National Review article has it spot-on. It’s not the kick in the pants that anyone wanted, but it is what could be needed.

    –J

    • dogstar29 says:
      0
      0

      Currently the Delta is a bit more expensive than the Atlas for similar payloads. The Falcon does not have quite the same payload capacity but could take over many of the lighter payloads. Together they could (IMO) take over completely for Atlas if necessary. But it would take a decision now to certify Falcon and ramp up Delta production,

      • Jeff Havens says:
        0
        0

        Yeah, but it’s the SAME company, technically. They got themselves into this situation by low R&D and profit taking. They can EAT the extra cost of switching payloads over to Delta; at least they aren’t losing the entire contract. Only losers in this case is Aerojet for the strapons, since Delta uses ATK.

  4. Thomas says:
    0
    0

    A couple of comments:
    300 million less is compared to a Delta IV
    Heavy, not the Atlas V. There is a 30% cost increase from Falcon 9 to
    Atlas V currently. You wait until Space X has to go through all of the
    FAR requirements, EVMS and the rest of the government burden which is
    NOT factored into his 50% cost jump for military payloads, only the
    technical requirements have been.

    For the EELV initiative, to fund two
    separate launchers, the Air Force would only fund one new liquid rocket
    engine and one new solid rocket booster. Delta IV got the new liquid
    rocket engine, RS-68 to be cheap, simple and powerful LOX/H2
    gas-generator cycle, and Atlas-V got the new solid rocket booster by
    Aerojet.

    SpaceX is going with a LOX/Methane because it is the
    right fuel for Elon’s true mission; to go to Mars. It is second best
    for the first stage (RP/LOX), second best for upper stage (LOX/H2).
    Only way it trades is for a deep space run to Mars. His original purpose
    in starting SpaceX was to get the government subsidies for this mission. One way or
    another you and I will pay for a new engine, whether through subsidies
    through SpaceX or any other prime/2nd tier contractor. If you think
    Elon has done what he’s done any differently than any other Aerospace
    contractor you’re fooling yourself. He veiled it differently – thats
    the kicker.

    • DTARS says:
      0
      0

      When you say best for first stage or second stage you are not assuming reusability correct? Just better one time performance. Not cheaper do to more flights per vehicle.

      If your second stage doesn’t come home to refuel I would agree, but shouldn’t most second stages find there way back to earth or back to a fuel depot for reuse anyway?? Spacex has just launch two second stages to geo. Where are those second stage boosters now?? Slowly deorbiting as junk. Falcon heavy will have added capacity for geo satellites. Couldn’t electric propulsion be used to guide the second stage to a fuel depot were it is refilled and reused turning them into tugs? Or use the extra margin to add a shield and bring it home for reuse?

      For the first stage if RP-1 engines can only fly 25 times before refurbish and methane can fly 100 and cleaner on our atmosphere then RP-1 engines need to be replaced by methane ASAP.

      How practical is methane for fuel depots anyway compared other fuels???

    • Mader Levap says:
      0
      0

      Second best under what criteria? Protip: SpaceX optimizes for cost, not performance.

    • hikingmike says:
      0
      0

      And another good reason for using LOX/Methane and the strategy of (your words) “2nd best” for first stage and second stage like you said, is that you don’t have to develop two completely different engine lines, have two fuel delivery systems with more pad costs, etc. Not to mention that Hydrogen costs the most out of any of those. It’s another strong cost efficiency argument, not just a Mars mission argument. SpaceX has proven that’s their strategy with Merlin (Falcon 9 used 9 Merlins, not a new engine…and they have early plans to do that again with Falcon XX or whatever). They’ve have one engine at a time so far. And they’ll reuse them as soon as they can. Also maybe there is the reusability argument like DTARS said.

  5. Thomas says:
    0
    0

    Keith, to your comment, search for Hydrocarbon Boost Technology Demonstrator.

    • Henry Vanderbilt says:
      0
      0

      Note that HBTD is “.. maturing critical technologies to reduce the risk in developing a long-life liquid oxygen/kerosene oxygen-rich staged combustion booster engine…” and “.. initiated in 2007 and is scheduled to be complete in 2020.”

      The goal is a highly reusable 250Klbf lox-kero booster engine using staged combustion and a lox-rich preburner. In other words, we’re spending money and studying hard to be ready by 2020 to start thinking about designing an actual engine of a type that the Russians have been flying since the 1980’s.

      No offense to any of the no-doubt talented individuals involved, but that’s US government space launch policy to a T: Spend a a generation funding studies and technology maturation and risk-reduction, but never actually build a useful farging engine.

      I saw an AvWeek story yesterday that said it’d take us five years and a billion dollars to start US RD-180 production. I also checked the number of Atlas 5 (and 3) launches to date; it’s about fifty. So, we’ve used about half of that 101-engine cheap RD-180 contract so far, with near-future A5 launch rate looking like about 10/year. So, even if the Russians don’t embargo us, we have perhaps five years of cheap RD-180s left.

      Sounds like a simple decision to me: Start building the damn factory NOW, and as a backup tell the HBTD people their mission has changed: They have five years and a billion to fly an actual no-excuses production-ready engine.

      I predict the actual decision will be, no decision, business as usual. Then people will be shocked, shocked, when five years from now we still don’t have US replacements for suddenly-far-more-expensive RD-180s.

      Hrrmph. I’m going to go do something useful, as opposed to beating my gums where nobody who can or will actually DO anything is listening.

      • Henry Vanderbilt says:
        0
        0

        I do get grumpy about this sort of thing at times – I’ve been actively involved in trying to get the US to adopt sensible policy on space-launch propulsion development since 1986, and the problem we’re discussing here has been festering since the 70’s.

        But hey, maybe the right person in the right place will be listening and rethinking some basic assumptions. Gotta keep trying. This time for sure!

  6. space_confused says:
    0
    0

    Right after Aerojet-Rocketdyne lays off 20% of it’s Los Angeles engineers at end of March, they’ll get right on developing new large engines.

    • Ben Russell-Gough says:
      0
      0

      Yeah, something tells me that The Powers That Be need to act quickly to stop companies like Rocketdyne literally burning the ships in the harbour.

  7. DTARS says:
    0
    0

    Keith’s note: Wouldn’t it be prudent to start building Americanized versions of these engines – or develop home grown designs?
    I pick number two!!

    Wouldn’t it be prudent to develop home grow designs for recoverable rockets for the FUTURE. Seems the mind set for engines is the same as it is for old throw away rockets.

    The solution should be to just buy merlin engines till the big boys decide to compete and build their own recoverable rockets with multi relightable engines.

    Tinker tweeted that orbital should try to buy Merlin’s for Spacex and sue them if they won’t sell. MADE IN AMERICA!

    Spacex could also sell its whole falcon R first stage to customers like orbital too.

    To heck with the OLD Fashion Russian rocket engines

    • Michael Spencer says:
      0
      0

      Hmm. I’m as patriotic as the next guy but this is jingoism. And as to ‘old’ Russian stuff, this non-technical observer watches Russia build on the old stuff, using what’s dependable. There’s a lot to be said for that.

      Oh. And they still have HSF.

      • DTARS says:
        0
        0

        As I see it one of the big problems with Rocket science is that designing a safe dependable rocket is so dangerous. So there is tendency to not to innovate, but to stay with what works, which is very understandable. Also for years companies have worked on making rockets more efficient but not less expensive. Well all that is about to change. The new standard is now cost and reuseablity. All this talk of copying Russian engines doesn’t move us foreword. I don’t know what it takes to build an engine that can be reused 100 200 times that’s why I’m asking? In a few days Musk will move closer to the cheaper rocket age, while other’s talk about just rebuilding old throw away rocket engines.

        As far as I know no one but musk is designing for affordable reuseablity now. Why not? Are they blind.

        If methane is the ticket to a booster that can be reused 100 times with little maintenance then they all should be racing to beat him to it.

        Were is good old capitalistic compitition? Sucking up to congress for cost plus development contracts I guess?

        Also the made in america comment was a quote from Tinker @John_Gardi

        • DTARS says:
          0
          0

          I’m an American and I’m all for Americans having real productive space jobs!!!

        • hikingmike says:
          0
          0

          Just thought I’d throw this out there – XCOR is working on methane piston pump rocket engines. They’ve already proven their piston pumps with kerosene LOX.

          piston pumps are powered with engine heat, which, when used with XCOR’s patent pending thermodynamic cycle, can achieve an Isp as high as the staged combustion cycle, which is the most efficient cycle for LOX/hydrocarbon engines and used on the best engines now

          • dogstar29 says:
            0
            0

            Piston pumps are less expensive and a perfectly reasonable approach for smaller engines operating at high pressures or where weight is not critical. For large engines or weight-critical situations a turbopump is lighter and can achieve the same pressures.

          • hikingmike says:
            0
            0

            Ok makes sense. I thought there might be a caveat like that 🙂

      • DTARS says:
        0
        0

        I just looked up jingoism lol new word lol.

    • Henry Vanderbilt says:
      0
      0

      DTARS – you can’t just sub Merlins for an RD-180 in an Atlas 5 or for the NK-33/AJ-26 in an Orbital Sciences Antares. Both boosters are designed around staged-combustion engines with roughly 10% better specific impulse than the Merlin. You’d have to redesign both boosters larger to carry more propellant, which would likely cascade on to a redesign of production, ground-handling, and launch equipment. It’d take years, and cost billions.

      Nor would designing a US equivalent to these engines be cheap or quick. “OLD Fashion” Russian rocket engines? The brutal fact is, these engines are more propellant-efficient than anything we’re currently set up to build. Climbing that learning curve will take non-trivial time and cost non-trivial money.

      SpaceX deliberately took a different approach, trading that last 10% of Isp, propellant-efficiency, to build their engines much cheaper and lighter. It’s no accident that the engine stat SpaceX brags about is thrust-to-weight where they’re near twice as good as the Russians, not Isp where they’re about 10% short. The overall result seems to be a somewhat larger booster for a given payload, at a considerably lower overall cost. I’d call that a win – but it means the engines are not practically interchangeable.

      • DTARS says:
        0
        0

        Thanks

      • hikingmike says:
        0
        0

        Well, theoretically could they just run with less performance and payload that way? Definitely not ideal but maybe in a pinch.

        • Henry Vanderbilt says:
          0
          0

          The issue is, how much less payload? The short no-math version is, a small performance loss in first stage propulsion can lead to a big drop in orbital payload, possibly to the point of zeroing it.

          The no-math version of the reason is that since orbital payload is only a few percent of the total rocket liftoff mass, and since absent significant system redesign any propulsion performance loss has to be made up by reducing payload, a 10% performance drop in first stage propulsion can easily become a 50-100% loss in final payload.

          For the math, search “the rocket equation”, get a calculator with an “ln” key, look up some rocket performance stats, and start playing with sample cases. It’s not that complicated with just a little practice, and you will not really understand rocket performance tradeoffs until you do.

          • hikingmike says:
            0
            0

            Actually I did think of that too, so understood. That is a possibility. Someone has to do the calculation on that I guess to know. Maybe I’ll try out the rocket equation sometime 🙂 That’s one we didn’t have in my Aero class. Thanks.

          • Henry Vanderbilt says:
            0
            0

            If you’ve done Aero, the rocket equation should be no problem. For a single rocket stage doing a single burn, ideal velocity change (IE in zero G and vacuum) equals (natural log of (pre-burn mass divided by post-burn mass) ) times the exhaust velocity. ln(M1/M2) * Vexh, or ln (MR) * Vexh, where MR is “Mass Ratio”.

            For multiple stages, it’s additive. Final velocity change (Delta V) is the sum of the individual stage burn Delta V’s.

            You need to dig a bit to find stage masses “dry” (zero propellant but otherwise ready to go) and “wet” (full propellant), and engine “specific impulse”, Isp, which for arcane historical reasons is generally expressed in seconds. (You can think of Isp as the number of seconds you get one pound force of thrust from expending one pound mass of propellant; for rocket engines of orbital launch interest it can range from the low 200’s to mid 400’s.)

            One tricky bit is, rocket engines have lower Isp at sea level than in vacuum, due to back pressure. This matters for first stages. IE, RD-180 (from memory) is rated at roughly 310 seconds Isp at sea level, roughly 350 in vacuum. (For back-of-the-envelope estimates, you won’t go too far wrong assuming a “trajectory average isp” around 330s.) Not an issue for upper stage engines where you’ll only generally see the vac Isp listed, but for first stage engines you need to be sure whether the number given is sea-level or vac Isp.

    • Steve Whitfield says:
      0
      0

      I’m only stating an assumption here, but I suspect that the situation is actually much simpler than it appears. In order to develop a US product as an alternative someone would have to invest a large chunk of money up front and not see a return on that investment for at least several years, which is not the way that old school US companies are typically operating these days. If they can embrace the status quo and make enough money without the risk of an R&D investment, that seems to be the way they choose to go. It’s short-sighted, but it appears to be the safe route. Politics also enters into it, in that the Russians wouldn’t hesitate to subsidize their engine sales in order to undercut whatever price an American version came out at. Only a similar subsidy (buy American) in the US could overcome that, and the US government isn’t thinking in those terms these days.

  8. Henry Vanderbilt says:
    0
    0

    I’ll more directly address Keith’s original question, shouldn’t we either be building these engines here or building a US-designed equivalent.

    We don’t build RD-180 here because setting up production would cost (mumble) billions and the end product would cost several times more per copy than ULA is currently paying the Russians.

    Part of the high cost would be duplicating a number of specific Russian manufacturing processes not currently routinely available here. In Russia these processes are already in place and paid for, and some (if not all) no doubt get used for (and paid for by) other products also. In the US, RD-180 production would have to pay the entire cost of setting up and operating the shops and staffs to perform these processes. (A meta-point here is that you tend to design systems around the production processes already locally available. “Better” or “worse” entirely aside, Russian engine manufacturing technology is *different*.)

    The other part of the high cost of US RD-180 manufacturing, of course, is the high cost of the traditional US aerospace establishment doing *anything* under decades of accumulated government regulations and contracting practices. My rule of thumb used to be that if USAF did something, it’d cost three times as much as a purely private effort; NASA, ten times as much. The multipliers have gotten worse since then, and baseline private effort costs are rising too.

    Moving on to producing a US-designed equivalent, keep in mind the RD-180 is a staged-combustion engine. (The pump-drive turbine exhausts are fed back into the engine – efficient, but tricky.) This means two things: It’s pretty close to as efficient as a rocket engine can get, and it was very complicated to develop and relatively expensive to manufacture.

    Leaving aside controversial statements like “the Russians are flat-out better than us at designing staged-combustion engines”, they certainly have designed and flown a lot more. The last US staged-combustion design to fly was SSME, a generation ago. We’ve probably spent well over what it’d cost to set up a US RD-180 plant on various US staged-combustion booster engine projects in recent decades. None has gotten beyond ground tests, for a mix of technical, budget, and lack of customer reasons.

    Also, see previous remarks about US government aerospace project cost multipliers. My estimate is that an official US government RD-180-replacement project would cost significant billions and take significant years – both billions and years easily rising into double-digits – with no guarantee of success. Nobody who undertsands these things wants to sign off on that.

    An alternative approach would be to give up that last ~10% of performance and go with a simpler, lighter engine cycle like a gas-generator, where the pump-drive turbine exhausts are dumped overboard. The end result is a somewhat larger rocket booster stage – but aluminum, kerosene, and LOX are cheap, unlike engines that get that last 10% of efficiency. The overall cost tradeoff can be quite favorable. EG, SpaceX.

    This policy dilemma is not an easy one. The immediate choices seem to be either continue depending on the Russians, put more funding into existing expensive US launch assets, or bet everything on a single lower cost US commercial launch asset that is extremely promising but not yet proven over time.

    Mind, it’s not as if we don’t have plenty of launcher development funding already. But we may now have to make the painful decisions involved in actually spending more of it on useful launchers.

    • dogstar29 says:
      0
      0

      As you suggest, both the Delta IV and Falcon 9 use the gas generator cycle.

    • Rocky J says:
      0
      0

      I totally agree that the cost to build in the US would be high. Michael Gass during the Senate hearing said that it could be done in two years. He gave no details. You emphasize what I did not in my earlier comment – American manufacturing costs much more than Russian. The Russian engineers probably work for 1/4 or 1/5th what an American engineer does (wages and benefits). That is the biggest factor. Second is the regulations/requirements in the US. To restate, these old established US corporations pay top dollar for labor – baby boomers; management ranks both in DOD/NASA and contractors are especially overburden with baby boomers.

  9. Steve Harrington says:
    0
    0

    Do we really trust that the Russians gave us all the information to copy their engine? The RD-180 is hard to duplicate due to the alloys and coatings which need to work in hot oxygen at 5000+ psi. (stainless steel burns great under these conditions) It will take a long time to get it right.
    However, an alternate design based on our Pistonless Rocket Fuel Pump, could be ready quickly and would be much more reliable and less expensive.
    http://www.rocketfuelpump.com

  10. Revanse says:
    0
    0

    How long would it take ULA to bring domestically built RD-180’s to the the launch pad? They have to build the factory, design the tooling, build components, test components, test the engines.

    At the speed ULA moves, the new engines wouldn’t be be flying until 2019, at the earliest.

    Knowing ULA, they won’t spend any money on this until after the Russians have cut off supply. Even then, would they spend the money? Would they? Really?

    By 2019, SpaceX could easily own the commercial market. Their rates will under-price ULA by 50% to 80%. That’s with ULA’s current pricing, without the billions of additional costs they would take on by building domestic versions of the RD-180.

    Why spend billions to build RD-180’s in the US if there won’t be a guaranteed customer? With SpaceX bidding, ULA’s business can only get smaller. There will be no guaranteed customer.

    Even if the Russians cut off the engines tomorrow, why should Lockheed and Boeing pay for domestic versions? The end product would be more expensive. The return on investment would be lower, and there would be considerable risk that the product would not be salable.

    Unless ULA can sucker the US government into footing the bill for domestic engine production, a Russian embargo may finish ULA as a company.

    • DTARS says:
      0
      0

      How much profit does ULA make on each launch of their rockets? How much juice do they have to play with??
      Isn’t the first stage engine pack the most expensive part. They get them for 10 million??How much it the rest of the first stage core?? Didn’t musk say falcons first stage cost 30 million? Sounds like ULAs building cheap and marking up A lot???

      • dogstar29 says:
        0
        0

        The Delta IV is domestic, however the profit margin on it is less than the Atlas.Nevertheless Delta production could be ramped up quite a bit if demand existed. Boeing’s original plans were for a much higher flight rate. Indeed, Boeing has even suggested they could reactivate the second launch pad at Complex 37 if needed. However this would take awhile. There is of course another option; the Falcon could be qualified for most DOD payloads. I’m sure with the Delta and Falcon available the load could be carried even without Atlas.

  11. Littrow says:
    0
    0

    “It’s past time for the nation that won the space race to get back in the business,”

    They do not seem to recognize that in an organization in which “mission operations” has taken over nearly all aspects of management, being able to design or build anything doesn’t count as a desirable capability. In human space flight particularly, the management, all from “mission operations” has for the last couple of decades sought to give all design and development responsibilities to foreign governments. Our people avoided “getting their hands dirty”. Our most important duties have been riding rockets, pressing buttons, looking out windows and promoting those who can write the checklists and push the buttons.

    I guess Constellation/Orion is the one set of hardware in which NASA is trying to to develop something new. Of course they put operations people in charge of the effort, which perhaps explains why we are no closer to flying anything today than ten years ago…ten years ago in 2004 we were going to be flying within 6-7 years in 2011. Now in 2014 we are still about the same time period away from flying people on a NASA rocket again.

  12. ed2291 says:
    0
    0

    Keith: ” Wouldn’t it be prudent to start building Americanized versions of these engines – or develop home grown designs?”

    Me: Is it not incredibly criminally insane not to? (I am not as diplomatic as Keith.)

  13. Richard H. Shores says:
    0
    0

    This is what happens when you put all of your eggs in the Russian basket.