Congress Blinks on RD-180s
Spending Bill Lifts RD-180 Ban, Puts ULA Back in Competitive Game, SpaceNews
“A massive U.S. government spending bill, released by lawmakers Dec. 16, effectively lifts a ban on the Russian rocket engine that powers United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket at least until Oct. 1, re-energizing competition for Defense Department launch contracts between ULA and SpaceX. The new language, included in the omnibus spending bill for 2016, says “that notwithstanding any other provision of law” the Air Force could award a launch contract to any certified company “regardless of the country of origin of the rocket engine that will be used on its launch vehicle, in order to ensure robust competition and continued assured access to space.”
– DoD Denies RD-180 Waiver For ULA, earlier post
– Earlier RD-180 posts
You can thank efforts of Alabama Senator Shelby and Illinois Senator Durbin crafted provision to lift RD-180 Rocket ban by airdropping into 2000 page omnibus appropriations bill in secret without debate form any senator or offer alternative bills . They pretty much subverted democracy of the full senate process in the interest of ULA= Boeing+Lockheed keep Atlas V rocket flying with RD-180 Rocket engines. Campaign contribution to Shelby and Durbin money well spent.
Money for their districts, and for Russia to pay for the RD-180 engines.
Jeff2space Shelby help 600 worker of ULA Alabama plant keep their job safe and line pocket full of money for Putin and his cronies friends nice happy ending for both.
What did Durbin get? Is it because Boeing is now headquartered in Chicago?
The ability to slip these kinds of bills into any type of spending package without debate should be illegal; this is wrong. These two Senators just spent hundreds of millions without so much as a vote?? That’s frustrating.. I agree with Mr. McCain, and I’m as liberal as you can get.
They also had their HOR allies. Possibly from the same states. The President could still veto it.
I agree it is wrong and undemocratic. Frank Wolf used the same strategy to pass a law forbidding NASA from even talking to anyone from China. Powerful members of Congress frequently violate the democratic process by stuffing unrelated riders into “must-pass” appropriations bills, and even collect large amounts of money from the companies they help, which one might think would be bribery.
However it is all perfectly legal. Who made the laws? Congress, of course. Welcome to America.
What is undemocratic about this? America is a country of many disparate interests that somehow need to come together from time to time to move the ball forward. Political horse trading is the grease, so to speak.
Sometimes the grease stinks, I admit, but on the other hand view points are so different that some means is needed to find consensus.
The Democrats – a party I’m proud to call my own- used some underhanded procedures to pass the health care laws, for instance. It stinks, yes. Sometimes we win, some times other Americans win.
I don’t think undemocratic is the correct word. Note that both the United States and the United Kingdom can be said to have democratic governments, but the way those countries pass laws is very different. One can feel that a particular, democratic way to pass laws is not ideal, without saying it is undemocratic.
I happen to think there is a problem with adding unrelated riders to a bill. Everyone wants to get their way and win, but the mechanisms for passing laws should not cater to that. If the majority of the people’s representatives would vote against a measure, I don’t think the process should allow them to be tricked or coerced into passing it.
However, my real concern is that many congressmen who voted for this rider may not have even been aware of it. A couple sentences were added to a 2000-odd page bill, within a few days of the final vote. How many congressmen (or their staff) knew that had happened? I’m fairly sure no one had time to re-read the whole thing and look for changes. (Or do they get an electronic version where they can do an automatic search for changes?)
You’re right that ‘undemocratic’ isn’t precise; Mr. Woodward would likely agree. we throw around the word ‘democracy’ pretty loosely to mean some form of representative government while in truth we are in no sense representative, partly because the more conservative among us tend to vote in higher proportion, partly because the Senate is laughably unrepresentative per the constitution.
I still don’t really find much fault with what is described as ‘last minute items’ stuffed into bills. As I said, it’s the grease that allows Americans with interests and view points very far apart to find some consensus.
Making sausage they call it.
Mr Anderson nice mention of lift the RD-180 rocket ban provision airdropped in the 2000 page omnibus appropriation bill in the dead of night. Very sneaky of Shelby and Durbin using this method trick US Senate passing there bill. Obama will signed big 1.8 trillion spending bill into law just this Weekend.
Why Durbin?
“An angry Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) delivered a blistering speech on Wednesday blasting two of his colleagues and United Launch Alliance (ULA) over a provision in the omnibus spending bill that would lift restrictions on the use of Russian-built RD-180 engines to launch defense payloads.
http://www.parabolicarc.com…
I sw that. And I noticed that Sen. McCain’s chief argument was- Ukraine. Foreign policy is very often based on short-term thinking.
Nowhere did I see- I didn’t look at everything- the argument made correctly above by Mr. Shupp, which paraphrased is something like “we should be ashamed of ourselves. We can do better”.
That would be called leadership.
RD-180 is not a “50 year old design”. RD-180 is a relatively modern staged combustion LOX/kerosene engine dating back to 1999.
And this is why, ladies and gentlemen, you make sure to pay for your lobbyists!
A major motion picture needs to be made about these engines. Keep it true to detail, and most people will think it is one of most clever and original works of fiction.
I’ve never liked the RD-180 arrangement, but at this point it’s pretty hard not to see something attractive in Atlas V’s record of 60 for 60. The only other rockets in all of history that even comes close are its ULA stable mate Delta IV’s 30 for 30 (more or less) record and the Saturn V’s 13 for 13 (not counting some close calls). Nothing else is even close to being in the same reliability league, which is a capability not to be discarded lightly, even if it is politically distasteful.
ULA always assured that Delta IV production could be ramped up incase something happened to the Atlas V. Guess they read too many fairy tales.
Delta IV was always going to be more expensive than Atlas V. Partly that is due to the engines (Russian engines are cheap because Russian labor is cheap) and due to the higher cost of dealing with deep cryogens (LH2) in large quantities in lower stages.
Yet the high costs were unanticipated during the design process. Delta IV was designed from a clean sheet, and the expectation was that it would be extremely competitive. Much the same sequence of events occurred with the Shuttle. I think we need a better understanding of why our predictions of operating cost sometimes turn out to be so inaccurate, leading us to make poor decisions during the development process.
“we need a better understanding of why our predictions of operating cost sometimes turn out to be so inaccurate”
This has to be the understatement of the century.
For one, LH2 is a deep cryogenic liquid. It is a pain to design for, and it is a pain operationally. Yet the “performance uber alles” (credit Henry Spencer for calling them that in sci.space) type of aerospace engineer will overlook all of its downsides and concentrate only on the high ISP of LOX/LH2 engines.
Using cryogenic fuels is also difficult. That is, ironically, a selling point. There is a tendency in the field to dismiss things by saying, “anyone can do that” and assume that, if it took a lot of work, it must be worth something. The same attitude is applied to the latest technology (advancing the state of the art) rather than using existing and proven technology. The later is boring.
I’m sure it isn’t the whole story, but In spacecraft (rather than launch vehicle) development, I have noticed a bias against making systems fault tolerant. That is, feeling that effort should go into making sure a system doesn’t break, rather than making sure it’s easy to fix if it does. The former requires identifying failure modes (and you never find all of them) while the later does not. If your cost is based on having eliminated all the failure modes and you missed a few, the operational will end up higher than anticipated.
I think this reflects some criticism of the Falcon 9 flight which had an engine shut down: Was that a problem, since one of the engines failed, or a success because the vehicle could operate with the remaining eight? Which approach would be more cost effective?
Back in the early 1980s, I recall that the Delta had a 98% success rate. Also, according to wikipedia, the Delta II is 151 out of 153, and one of the failures was “partial”.. so a 99% success rate.
Yes, until EELV came along, Delta II was pretty much the gold standard of reliability for rockets. Compared to every other rocket, it’s 98%-99% success rate looked pretty good. Compared to any other industry, its 1%-2% failure rate was pretty awful and speaks volumes about one of the key reasons spaceflight has yet to develop into a commercially viable industry. In that regard, EELV, especially Atlas V, has achieved a pretty singular accomplishment in moving rocket reliability well above historic norms. I still choke on the cost and the politics, but I have to admit they have done something nobody else can claim.
Well so far so good with the EELVs, but the Delta IV is just at 30 launches and the Atlas V is at 60. Each with one partial failure. It seems a little early to judge them significantly more reliable than the Delta or Delta II. Even if we only count the 7000 series Delta II, it had 128 launches with one failure, and one partial failure (stats are all from wikipedia). Of course the EELVs lift significantly more payload, so what they’re doing is impressive.
There’s a reasonable argument that Delta IV had one partial failure even though it was only with a dummy satellite and a couple micro sat hitchhikers, but enough of an reason to not give it has high marks as Atlas V. But it’s really stretching things to call Atlas V’s single anomaly a “partial failure”. The payload was still delivered intact to the desired location, after making up a slight difference in delivery orbit due to a four second early cutoff by the Centaur upper stage. True that modifications were subsequently made to ensure no repeat, but it still accomplished the mission. Also true that many rockets have made many more than 60 flights, but that’s still an impressive number of flights and 60 successes out of 60 tries is in a league all by itself in this business no matter how you count it. Credit were credit is due.
I agree, but unfortunately Aerojet Rockedyne has a history of holding its hand out for government money to develop large new liquid fueled rocket engines. It seems it does not want to take on the financial risk of “going it alone”.
Luckily, the US now has plenty of engineers that work at other US companies with the experience necessary to develop new engines. SpaceX and Blue Origin being two visible examples.