Congress Seeks to Reverse RD-180 Legislation (Update)
McCarthy Introduces Legislation to Reinstate Ban on Russian Rocket Engines
“Today, Congressman Kevin McCarthy introduced legislation to reinstate congressionally imposed restrictions on the purchase of RD-180 rocket engines (Russian rocket engines) for military space launches. This bill repeals language from the Fiscal Year 2016 Omnibus Appropriations Bill that not only allows for the unlimited purchase of Russian rocket engines, but also undermines months of transparent debate and bipartisan policy the was signed into law in the Fiscal Year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act.”
Keith’s 27 Jan 6:30 pm update: Moments ago Sen. McCain just gave a shout out on CNN to SpaceX as being able to provide a competitive alternative to the RD-180 saying “we paid this outfit ULA $800 million just to stay in business”. McCain went on to note that the company that serves as a middleman in the sale of RD-180s between Russia and ULA “involves thugs and cronies of Vladimir Putin”.
McCain vows to undo U.S. legislation that eased Russian rocket engine ban, Reuters
“U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain on Wednesday said he planned to introduce legislation that would strike language included in a massive 2016 spending bill that eased a congressional ban on the use of Russian rocket engines. McCain told a hearing on the issue that he and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy would introduce the legislation on Thursday, the first of many actions planned “to ensure we end our dependence on Russian rocket engines and stop subsidizing Vladimir Putin and his gang of corrupt cronies.”
Hearing: Military Space Launch and the Use of Russian-made Rocket Engines
– Testimony of Deborah Lee James, Secretary Of The Air Force (not yet posted)
– Testimony of Frank Kendall III
Under Secretary Of Defense For Acquisition, Technology And Logistics
“In this constrained budget environment, we believe that competition between certified launch providers on a level playing field is the best mechanism to incentivize the innovation required to do so. The simple fact is that the Delta family is not cost competitive, and with the restrictions on the use of Atlas, the Department must continue to look for alternative launch capabilities which are compliant with the law.”
– ULA Gets A Russian Christmas Gift From Sen. Shelby
– Sen. Shelby: The King Of Political Cronyism and Hypocrisy, earlier post
– Congress Blinks on RD-180s, earlier post
– Earlier RD-180 posts
He would have to overcome both industy lobbying and several of his Senate colleagues. Not an easy course.
No doubt. When you really peel the onion back is this about:
1. Russia and their aggressive behavior?
2. Who said what in Russia and the US?
3. SpaceX vs. ULA vs. politicians?
4. Political posturing by our esteemed politicians?
In the end, if the military are going to “compete” a launch capability who really cares with what the provider executes the capability, provided they are qualified and certified. This issue certainty does not deserve such attention from our elected; obviously there are axes being ground.
“who really cares with what the provider executes the capability”
I agree, yet Congress has no hesitation in ordering NASA to use “shuttle-derived” components (i.e. 40 year old designs) to build a new HLV and to use it for various missions.
Dr. Woodard:
The point you are making- that Congress grabbed the stagecoach reins- is made frequently and with derision. But wasn’t it the case that post-shuttle determining a way forward was fractured and moribund? And that a decision about future direction needed to be made among many alternatives, all with entrenched partisans, and on the whole none a clear winner?
In that environment, where the experts disagreed, why not choose a direction that both supported the workforce and, on the surface at least, appeared to iterate shuttle knowledge?
We’ve had some very ugly intervening years to look back. As it turned out there’s been very little iteration, as many who are deeply knowledgeable have posted here at NASAWatch.
The current situation was largely created by Congress, it is true, and could have been predicted; Congress is very far from an effective leader. Senators (mostly) stepped into a power vacuum because the real rocket scientists simply f***ked up by miserably failing to come to consensus.
And the rocket scientists failed, at least in part, by not realizing that a successful post-Shuttle direction must include political concerns. In many ways it was the perfect storm.
The final failure, from the armchair of this non-scientist, lies squarely with Mr. Obama. It’s his NASA. It is his job to find consensus. Like so many other areas, Mr. Obama’s much vaunted ‘Change’ simply failed, for many reasons, but he’s the Big Dog and he gets the blame.
And now our beloved NASA, the repository of our collective dreams and hopes, peopled by stunningly-qualified thousands with unimaginable capabilities, the HSF efforts of lay helplessly floating in an unknown sea, encumbered by an under-utilized and possibly useless space station in an awkward orbit, and compelled to expend more billions on a rocket now obviously irrelevant.
In so many ways it’s great to be an American. We are made of hope.
The “rocket scientists” didn’t fail. This decision came from the very top. The then NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. It was essentially dictated that the CEV capsule be “too big” to be launched on EELVs. Yet the only flight to date of Orion (a slightly scaled back CEV) has been on Delta IV Heavy. Curious, no?
The Ares I plus Ares V transportation architecture came straight from Michael Griffin. Griffin was pushing for very large launch vehicles long before he was appointed NASA Administrator.
http://www.spacelaunchrepor…
SLS is an evolution of Ares V. SLS exists because Congress didn’t want the corporate welfare of the Ares program to end.
The current situation is a failure of leadership in the Executive Branch coupled with a political failure in the Legislative Branch. You really should not pin this one on the engineers. They are just cogs in the huge machine of the US Government.
So to further on Dr. Griffin; He decided to execute the design “in house” by NASA employees then piece meal it out to contractors for implementation. The NASA design processes were woefully inadequate and interaction with the contractor “tribal knowledge” was non-existent. The end result was design that was, for the most part, non-executable and needed to be turned over to the contractors to get somewhat right albeit under the watchful eyes of the same that messed it up to start with. All that are trying to get the beyond earth program back on track are barely coming out of Dr. Griffin’s mess.
Griffin’s plan was to have the NASA teams regain that lost knowledge by working first on Ares I. But Ares I was just a step along the path to the “big rocket” that Griffin really wanted which was Ares V.
SFAIK even Ares I was to be built by contractors. Moreover many elements of the design were decades old.
I see it somewhat differently. Mr. Obama began his administration with a bold and correct move. Understanding that Constellation was unable to produce practical value because of its cost, he cancelled it and applied the resources to
Commercial Crew and Space Technology, two programs that could work in partnership with industry to make human spaceflight practical by reducing its cost.
However Congress passed legislation which defunded these technology programs and replaced them with a massive HLV that was, in an astonishing twist, required by law to use 40-year-old Shuttle technology. Only after years of delay has Congress realized that only Commercial Crew can actually return Americans to space in significant numbers and restored most of its funding.
“he cancelled it and applied the resources to
Commercial Crew and Space Technology,”
Thank you for confirming this, I thought that I was the only one to remember! Many seem to have forgotten that President Obama’s ‘Space Vision’ was to be about developing new –and hopefully better– ways of doing things as well as developing the tools for the much touted Flexible Path. Not just cancelling VSE and throwing NASA to the wolves…
With Congress vetoing his ‘Vision’ this viewer from afar is not surprised that the current President subsequently decided to let Congress repeat the mistakes of the past. All over again. Only with less money. Perhaps they will get “different results” with this repetition. Einstein refers.
Eeinstein
Well, that was a jobs-program decision on the part of Congress, not really a space-program decision. Michaud, Stennis, and Marshall are all in southern states with relatively poor economic prospects, and the respective Congressional delegations for those districts were *highly motivated* to keep high-paying aerospace jobs in their districts. The SLS fiasco is pure pork-barrel politics (which was also the reason for dispersing NASA field centers throughout the country during the run-up to Apollo – got to spread those federal dollars around!).
Indeed not, but the rhetoric has become remarkably unrestrained, even for Sen. McCain.
He left out an important qualifier. I don’t know if the $800 million is accurate, but he needed to point out that it is an annual payment: year in, year out.
He also failed to point out that ULA’s rockets are very expensive. I’m not sufficiently close to the industry to know what sort of costs ULA has with Delta and Atlas, but the arrival of Falcon has certainly raised questions about ULA’s basis. Both ULA rockets are stunningly expensive, now that there is something to compare them aside from the similarly-bloated European efforts.
It’s true as Mr. Bruno asserts that the DoD wanted and received ‘assured access’. Certainly that assurance has value.
Lots of questions to be answered, and I hope that next year’s changes will bring a sober analysis.
On the other hand I felt the same way 7 years ago and look where we are.
And the ULA rockets are very reliable.
no one knows what they cost because of the voodoo accounting they use so no actually prices can get nailed down.. they should be ordered to post the launch costs on their website and the cost of EVERY option.
What is interesting is that so far there is no assured access by ULA for the heaviest payloads that only the Delta IV heavy can lift. When the Falcon Heavy lifts the Air Force STP-2 package later this year, then there will finally be redundancy after all these years.
Actually, since a FH retails for $128 million, and a D4H (after the D4medium is retired) goes for $800 million to $1 BILLION per launch (not including the $800m-1bill per year ULA junk fee), there still won’t be the Second Way.
Hey Yale, do you have a source on the $128M? What configuration would this be for? (in terms of stage reuse). SpaceX cites $90M for the FH, but I presume this is for the full reuse variant, I’m always looking for the price of other configurations.
Since STP-2 was ordered in 2012, I was using SpX’s pricing at the time: $85m-$128mill. Now they just publish a single price of $90 mill for 6400 kg to GTO. I assume this is for full recovery.
Also, SpX charges an extra 30-40 mill for gov launches due to the required oversight.
Thanks. Do you also have a reference for the Delta IV heavy cost? You wrote that it would be $0.8 to 1 billion per launch. That seems high even by ULA standards.
for example see:
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
at 1:04:30
Hurrah for Senator McCain for caring more about the USA than corporate welfare. Way to put the “country first”.
SpaceX, McCain, and everyone else can tout their accolades but the fact is that there is no replacement for the RD180. That engine is just too good. The Isp is considerably higher than anything in US stores or drawing boards.
Pity that ULA never bothered to exercise their right to produce it domestically. Instead they assumed that Uncle Sugar would continue propping them up indefinitely.
It has always been cheaper to pay lobbyists and congressional members and keep those dividends rolling to shareholders than to actually invest in innovations for the next vehicles.
If they did, the cost would be much higher than buying it from the Russians
Please show me the basis for that statement
current pricing habits of government contractors
“The 7 Habits of Highly Expensive People” 🙂
One can, I think, infer the truth of this proposition by simply noting that no domestic U.S. production capability for the RD-180 was ever established. LockMart, ULA or AJR would have been happy to set up a production line for RD-180’s on American soil if they’d thought they could do it and still make more money per copy on U.S.-built RD-180’s than they do by simply buying the engines from Russia and, in effect, reselling them to the Air Force and NRO at a markup. That none of them ever did such a thing implies that none ever thought it possible.
But the legacy aerospace world is not exactly a hotbed of mass production expertise. A lot of advances in manufacturing technology have been developed and fielded since the time of the RD-180’s Russian gestation. It might still be interesting to have some manufacturing concern with demonstrated expertise in engineering the mass production of large, precision machines, such as rocket engines, take a clean-sheet-of-paper look at what it would really take to tool up for building an RD-180 knock-off – including all the “secret sauce” metallurgy or workable equivalents – that costs usefully less than the $23 million and change that ULA evidently pays for each one. The obvious people to ask would be the manufacturing process engineers Elon Musk employs at SpaceX and Tesla, but I’m sure there are other organizations with relevant expertise who might come up with surprising insights about how to take cost out of the RD-180.
Not likely ever to happen, I suppose, but it’s fun to think about.
You cannot infer. There was not incentive compelling them to put out any effort. They work cost plus. With the corrosive influence of corporate socialism the path of least resistance was followed.
While true, ISP does not equate with lower launch costs.
The Isp (of the RD-180) is considerably higher than anything in US stores or drawing boards.
Untrue
RD-180 ISP sea level:311 vac: 338
The US made:
Raptor sea level:321 vac:363
RS-68a (delta iv) sea level:357 vac:407
RS-25 sea level:363 vac:453
The Blue Origin BE-3 and BE-4 would also be higher ISP
and which one of those engines runs on RP1 and LOX? only the RD-180, Please compare apples to apples.
If you want to compare engines with completely different fuels, then we may as well introduce some of the H2/Be – F2 engines that have sea level Isp of 500+ seconds
So what? you said:
“The Isp (of the RD-180) is considerably higher than anything in US stores or drawing boards”
Well you are wrong. Where do you say word one about propellant?
we are talking about a replacement engine for the Atlas V correct? It is a LOX RP1 rocket, changing fuels means redesigning the whole thing which in my book is no longer the same rocket.
Your sentence did not say that it was for replacing on an atlas. The ar1 is the only engine from the US that is designed to more or less fit into an atlas.
I didn’t have to state it, the whole article is about it.
whatever
sore loser
No, I was sarcastically disagreeing with you.
sorry, its hard to recognize sarcasm in messages, I try to stay away from it
Note that is exactly what ULA will be doing. the first stage of ULA’s new Vulcan launch vehicle will most likely use BE-4 LOX/methane engines from Blue Origin. The backup engine is the LOC/kerosene AR-1 from Aerojet Rocketdyne. No doubt the engine choice will have a huge impact on the design of the Vulcan first stage.
RD-180 is (if not the then certainly one of) the best hydrocarbon rocket engines ever made. RS-68, BE-3 and RS-25 are hydrogen engines. Raptor and BE-4 do not exist yet.
So what? SM said:
“The Isp (of the RD-180) is considerably higher than anything in US stores or drawing boards”
Well that’s wrong. Where does he say word one about propellant?
“Best” in the sense of highest Isp. But that is not the only metric.
The thrust/weight ratio of the Merlin 1-D is more than twice that of the RD-180.
The $/thrust ratio of the Merlin 1-D is about SIX TIMES BETTER than the RD-180.
I don’t have any information about the $/thrust ratio of Merlin.
Regarding thrust/weight, it is expected since the RD-180 is a big ORSC engine. A good TWR ratio is a very fine attribute to have for first stage engines (not that important for second stage).
Also, RD-180 has an excellent reliability record with 66 successful launches between Atlas III and Atlas V and no failures (one partial failure in 2007 is attributed to the Centaur upper stage).
ISP for rocket engines is like batting average for baseball players. Until you know the number, who cares?. If the ISP of the BE-3 were impressive, Blue Origin would publish it. The BE-4 is not complete, and based on the development schedule for staged combustion engines, it could be a while.
United Launch Alliance, or ULA, “may not be very competitive,” Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall said at a congressional hearing, citing lower-cost rivals such as Space Exploration Technologies Corp. that have emerged to challenge its monopoly on sensitive military launches.
Despite a multibillion-dollar cushion of previous Pentagon support, and certain contracting changes proposed over the next few years to help underwrite part of the venture’s transition to a new family of rockets, Mr. Kendall said it is still “questionable whether ULA will survive” to the end of the decade without additional help.
ULA is beginning a very long campaign that will go something like this: after SpaceX becomes the darling of the military (in some years yet) that very same military will face the sole-supplier conundrum again. Yes, SpaceX will be cheaper but it will be a single source.
At that point they decide whether or not to assist ULA’s modernization efforts. ULA will be lobbying tis effort and soon.
It’s too bad that Bezos is so secretive. With his own Blue origin First stage (BE-4 powered on ULA’s dime!) booster and BE-3 upper stage, he will have a real viable competitor for SpaceX medium payloads.