RD-180 Bad; RD-181 Good
Antares Upgrade Will Use RD-181s In Direct Buy From Energomash, Aviation Week
“Congressional concern about Russian aggression in the Crimean peninsula led to a ban in the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on using RD-180s purchased after Russia occupied the Ukrainian territory on Feb. 1. Grabe said that legislation will not affect the deal to buy RD-181s from Energomash. “We’ve coordinated with all relevant congressional committee staffs to keep them informed of our decision,” Grabe said.”
Well, maybe it will work out. I hear Russia could use the money. If Orbital can pay in Rubles, it could be a real deal. Having an assured supply source may be another story.
Not trying to take OSC’s side in this but my understanding is that there was realistically no other choice. No other practical options available. True?
Their only other choice would be to essentially create a new first stage, likely a solid fueled by ATK. They would be delayed beyond the first cargo delivery contract period.
So, no, they have no choice, but they made a lousy choice to begin with.
AIUI RD-181 is the export version of RD-193, the Angara engine, and it’s a near drop-in replacement for NK-33.
But new manufacture, so probably a bit more reliable.
OS might as well buy the RD-180s as they originally wanted. There should be no competition now. Who cares which they buy? It supports Putin either way.
Is RD-AMROSS involved in the importing? If they excluded that front company for Russian graft, then the price will probably be even lower! Think about it this way: if one 180 is equivalent to two 181s, then you could save LOTS of money by not paying the Russian corruption “tax”.
Either that or they just found a way to price the corruption into the base model cost. 🙂
They are buying direct from energomash
RD-AMROSS is a US company. But I agree it is getting a lot of money without doing any work, which is usually considered dishonest.
The RD-181 may require less modification to the booster.
I wonder if the price set in the contract will be in rubles or dollars?
Both are worthless…
Wait…WHAT ???
Let’s be brutal here – You want a high-power Kerolox engine, you either wait five or more years or you buy Russian. So, OSC have just done the one thing that gets them flying sooner rather than later. If Congress doesn’t like it, they should be asking Aerojet-PWR why no US equivalents to the RD-180/-171 family exist. I’m sure they won’t like the answers.
Oh, I suppose that you could try to buy a bigger cluster of engines (four or more per vehicle) from SpaceX but Musk doesn’t seem to be selling those right now.
You would have to also have to most likely redesign the stage one from propellant tanks on down.
if RS-84 hadnt been canceled, aerojet-rocketdyne would have a high power kerolox engine. but in the past, high performance meant lox hydrogen, lower performance meant kerolox delta II, and aerojet-rocketdyne only builds what someone pays for.
Aerojet-Rocketdyne is still waiting with its hand out for government funding for a new LOX/kerosene engine. In the meantime, SpaceX has successfully developed and is flying their Merlin LOX/kerosene engine and Blue Origin is developing a “large” LOX/kerosene engine of their own (which the Air Force seems interested in).
What exactly stopped Aerojet-Rocketdyne from developing the RS-84 without government money?
aerojet -rocketdyne is working with ULA to develop the AR-1 high performance kerolox engine, but it will take time. Spacex has a low performance engine, much like the old delta II that aerojet-rocketdyne discontinued. what stopped rocketdyne from completing the rs-84 – pratt and whitney was profiting from selling Russian engines for great profit ( same reason the venerable but ridiculously expensive RL10 hasn’t been replaced – you don’t compete within the company). both spacex and blue origin share multimillionaire owners that can pay to do what they want. aerojet-rocketdyne is now owned by GenCorp, its been around forever but doesn’t make enough money to invest in a new engine by itself ( and by closing the canoga facility has virtually guaranteed to be hamstrung on producing more than one line of engines)
But is that “high performance” truly needed? Falcon 9 seems to work quite well and there is little reason to believe that Falcon Heavy won’t work. ISP is not the metric to optimize. Cost per pound to orbit is.
“Spacex has a low performance engine”
More like high performance per dollar.
That opaque National Defense Authorization Act that was passed by Congress in a frenzy last week had a section in it that forbids the Pentagon from launching anything on a Russian engine. The NDAA apparently only excluded DoD from using Russian engines, since it was a defense bill. Nothing to date in Congress about NRO being likewise constrained. So Dmitry Rogozin’s admonition that he would not allow RD-180’s to be used to launch any US military flights has now been codified on this side of the Atlantic by the NDAA. I still wonder about any spysats on the Atlas V manifest , though.
Swapping in the RD-191 for the old Soviet moonrocket engines will give OSC a path to follow for Antares Cygnus. But Russia is imploding economically as we speak… the ruble devalued ten percent in one day. Russia gets most of its money from oil and gas, which are slumping badly. Those RD-xxx rocket engines are a source of foreign hard currency sales . We know the price…now we find out what they are really worth.
Who knows what the future has in store for Russia? The usually diatribic Vladimir Putin has been ominously silent of late . That makes me nervous.
Huh? The NRO is most certainly an agency that is part of the DoD.
Putin’s future is another episode of suffering for the Russian people. Russian history is replete with similar episodes.
what are you talking about? Did you think Russia was better with Yeltsin? Take a look at the GDP graph under Putin, as opposed to the GDP graph under the U.S. puppet Yeltsin, and the U.S. (Harvard) supplied economic policies. Russia has prospered under Putin, dramatically. So go study some more before making ridiculous statements.