Costs, benefits of RD-180 rocket engine replacement program debated.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

The U.S. national security space community was left wondering this spring whether a Russian company would continue to supply it with engines needed to launch heavy payloads on its Atlas rockets.

At issue was the RD-180, a first-stage engine needed to power the Atlas V. The crisis in Ukraine sparked a series of tit-for-tat sanctions between Russia and the United States. A statement from senior Russian leadership that the nation would stop supplying the Russian-built engine to the United States for military purposes highlighted U.S. dependence on the engine for Atlas V launches.

"Relying on Russian engines to launch satellites for our national security missions has always been bad policy," Rep. C. A. "Dutch" Ruppersberger, D-Md., and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.

Language in the fiscal year 2015 defense authorization bill would provide $220 million to kickstart domestic production of a new first-stage rocket engine, which would replace the RD-180.

That would only be a small down payment in an effort that would take several years and about $1.5 billion, experts interviewed said.

"An engine as powerful as that is a fairly complex undertaking and there would be a lot of work involved," said Jeff Foust, senior analyst at Futron Corp., a Bethesda, Maryland-based consultancy firm, which specializes in space business.

Concerns about the RD-180 supply prior to the Ukraine crisis sparked the Pentagon to form the RD-180 study group to look at the options. Chaired by retired Air Force Maj. Gen. H.J. "Mitch" Mitchell, now head of the Aerospace Corp., and co-chaired by former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, the board members concluded that "impacts of an RD-180 loss are significant, and near term (fiscal year 2014 to fiscal year 2017) options to mitigate them are significant."

The report has not been released to the public, but a PowerPoint with its key conclusions was posted on the Scribd website.

The document goes into the history of how the U.S. space agencies found themselves in their current predicament. It goes back to the beginnings of the evolved expendable launch vehicle (EELV) program in the 1990s when the Air Force was funding Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas -- which later merged with Boeing -- to produce a new generation of rockets. The Defense Department wanted competition for launch contracts and to produce more reliable rockets.

Lockheed Martin for its Atlas III and V rockets chose the RD-180, built by NPO Energomash, as its first-stage engine.

The reason was simple, said Foust. The engine was simply the best in the world. "There is nothing like the RD-180 available from U.S. or other western companies. It really is a very high quality engine," he said.

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