Is It Time To Kick the RD-180 Habit?
Don’t Back Down on Russian Sanctions, editorial, New York Times
“… But in recent years, Mr. Putin has become increasingly at odds with the United States. Meanwhile, United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of the defense giants Lockheed Martin and Boeing also known as ULA, has become the Pentagon’s primary rocket maker and gets its engines from NPO Energomash, a Russian company that reportedly has close ties to Mr. Putin. Senator John McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, says NPO Energomash could gain $300 million on engine sales that are to end under the law. The Pentagon, backed by ULA and American intelligence agencies, is pushing to change the law, arguing that additional Russian engines will be needed for at least a few more years.”
– USAF Admits The Obvious on RD-180 Engines, earlier post
– Breaking The RD-180 Addiction, earlier post
Save the available RD-180s for only launches that absolutely need them and use Falcons and Deltas for the rest.
It isn’t like adequate US rockets aren’t available.
The hell with the damn Russians.
We will actually be MORE redundant in launchers
Remember, all along heavy payloads were only liftable on the Delta IV Heavy. The Atlas Heavy never was created. No heavy lift redundancy if Deltas were grounded..
Both the Atlas V and Delta IV use flavors of the RL-10 rocket engines in their second stages, a redundancy no-no. If some problem is uncovered in Aerojet’s production, BOTH rockets may be grounded.
With the Delta family, the F9 and (targeted to be certified in 2017) FH, and the Atlas V to take up the slack, the US will have a more reliable, diversified fleet.
So there is vast hypocrisy in crying the blues about needing zillions of RD-180s for the Atlas.
I am more than willing to pay extra to maintain our security and also not feed Putin’s machine.
“Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.”
– Robert Goodloe Harper
FYI you need the Delta IV Heavy to replace the Atlas V in the 531, 541 & 551 configurations. AFAIK the Delta IV Heavy is about $550M each before additional USAF requirements costs along with a 5 year lead time from order to launch.
If the current legislative sanction language stands, then the USAF have only 5 RD-180 engines available.
What is the source of the 5 engines?
Chatter on nasaspaceflight forum.
AFAIK the USAF can only get the engines they already paid for according to the legislative sanction language.
add’t: the 5 engines are as yet undelivered units in addition to engines already on hand. There is 14 additional engines ordered but not paid for.
So, in fact, they do not only have 5 engines available, They have a number of engines in stockpile. That 5 refers to future extra availabilty under the legislation (or 9 more under an alternative proposal).
As you said, the D4H would replace the Atlas V x3x, x4x, and x5x. True, but they do have Atlas V engines available if they, to quote myself, “Save the available RD-180s for only launches that absolutely need them and use Falcons and Deltas for the rest.”
How many heavy lift Atlas flights are planned?
There are only 4 military launches for those categories from now thru 2017, when the Falcon Heavy should be certified, obsoleting the Atlas, Delta, and Vulcan.
As to cost, the Delta V Heavy is $400-600mill, and $355 mill in the bulk buy (but you should add $1oomill ELC junk fee).
ULA gives a 3.5 year lead time, so if you were to shift payload, they may be some delay (assuming no FH).
Stay the course and keep the ban on RD-180’s. In fact, as part of U.S. Sanctions, perhaps Congress should ban all Russian Rocket imports DOD, NASA and commercial. This could have negative impacts for Orbital ATK but they should have seen this coming and switched to a U.S. engine when the CRS Orbital flight blew up and not selected yet another Russian engine. The writing is on the wall. Putin will continue his Crimean obsession and others in Eastern Europe and South Asia and this will lead to more sanctions. Russia needs the hard cash from Russian Rocket Technology sales and this is one place we can make a quick dent in Putin and his cronies wallet.
Please share with us which US engine can be install on the Antares rocket?
OrbitalATK does not have a US alternate to the AJ-26 (NK-33). It is either the RD-180 or RD-181 from Russia. Otherwise they exit
the launch business.
They could switch to a modified Shuttle/SLS SRB as Stage 1 and launch from KSC’s 39B. They won’t exit the business with Pegasus and Minotaur still around, and still building Pegasus II or Thunderbolt, whatever the Stratolauncher rocket is.
Switching to a mod STS SRB solid booster takes too long and is basically developing a new launch vehicle from scratch. Moving to pad-39B at KSC is not financially variable. You have to use the crawler & MLP on account of the SLS.
The Pegasus is almost as expensive as the Falcon 9 with a 977 lb payload to LEO. And the civilian Minotaur-C is a re-branded Taurus-XL.
Stratolaunch have put the Pegasus II on the shelf and reevaluating their options.
I disagree that an SRB-based vehicle is starting from scratch. Thiokol/ATK have been toying with that idea ever since SRB-X in the early 1980s and they must have a stockpile of information from the abandoned Ares I. They have a lot of R&D data to fall back on. Regardless, you didn’t specify that the replacement for Antares has to be now, you said it was RD-181 or leave the market. That clearly is not true. RD-181-reengined Antares is by far the simplest option, but it is not the only one.
Stratolaunch still needs a rocket. SpaceX has declined to participate and I don’t see ULA being interested. Orbital is the most likely (only?) potential provider.
If I were Blue Origin, I would be talking to Stratolaunch.
BO seems to be in the hydrogen engine business. That’s an added complication for a mothership to carry top-off hydrogen to the launch point as well. And then there is the increased size of the vehicle for a hydrogen-powered core (think Delta IV vs. Atlas V) and Stratolauncher is already gigantic. BO could be an option, but Orbital’s experience seems closer to Stratolaunch’s business model.
BO is working on methane engines also. The BE-4 is a methane engine.
Thought it was understood that whatever solution that OrbitalATK have to replace the AJ-26 in the Antares will have to be in time to fulfilled their CRS-1 contract requirements for ISS resupply with the minimum new investment. OrbitalATK is not getting more money from their CRS-1 contract AFAIK.
New SRB based rockets will need new composite casings since the old steel segmented casings are no longer manufactured with the remaining segments allocated to the SLS. Hence a new rocket that someone will have to funded to developed along with modifications to existing MLPs at KSC or a new MLP.
No. Why is it okay for ULA to not replace RD-181 on Atlas V with Vulcan until 2019-2020 but Orbital ATK has to replace NK-33/RD-181 on Antares immediately?
Orbital ATK will need to start making more segments (steel or composite) soon anyway since NASA wants more than two or three SLS flights. They could leverage the investment between commercial and SLS.
Because OrbitalATK could not fulfilled their CRS-1 contract requirements if they don’t have a working launch vehicle. Then they have to decide to either default on their contract or outsource their launch service as with the Cygnus Orb-4 ISS resupply.
Sadly, Stratolaunch also appears to have dropped the DreamChaser Lite for human flight. 🙁
Why stop there Astroraider, lets ban all Russian titanium and palladium imports, among others, as well. Why be selective?
While we should move to a domestic engine, there is no way to do it before the next generation Atlas with the BE-4 is certified, which will be 5-7 years. No political purpose is served by accelerating the transition; there is no way it will displace Putin. The Delta is not a substitute due to much higher cost and the decision by ULA to terminate production.
The same could be said for the Methane/LNG powerd RS-25 so I have been kicking around the idea of the SSME itself as an engine for the just announce Air force RFP
http://yellowdragonblog.com…
So how could you possibly make this existing engine cheaper then the Delta IV?
So in my blog post I suggest that the Air Force now free of having to do R&D could instead do the trades and spend the money on a bulk buy of these engines and the RFP requires that the contractor put skin in the game so Aerojet would buy even more white tail RS-25;s to further reduce unit costs
$ 1 Billion buys 14 SSME’s Aerojet puts in its 40% so 6 more.
NASA agrees to fly two new engines with the old shuttle engines on the first three SLS flights to reduce the burden of funding on the Air Force/aerojet partnership(a swap or purchase)
The Air Force RSP states it wants to know who the vehicle manufacturer would be? Well who are the contenders for commercial crew to BEO? Orbital with Cygnus? perhaps a RS-25 powered EELV could be sold to NASA as another way to reduce unit costs
Lastly I blog about the idea that together with SLS using these same engines you could support three EELV providers even if the SSME EELV did not launch as often as vulcan or spaceX,If you use an existing engine and but don’t have a launch vehicle can you beat Vulcan to the pad:):)
The SSME is an expensive engine to manufacture, pushing the limits of performance. Moreover LH2 is not an ideal fuel for a booster or first stage because of its low density and the consequent large size of the fuel tanks, and because of the demanding insulation requirements.