US to launch production of Russian RD-180 rocket engines

The US Air Force is studying the possibility of launching the licensed production of Russian RD-180 rocket engines in the United States.

The US will begin assessing the licensed production of such engines in the next few weeks.

The Russian-made RD-180 rocket engine is one of the few high-tech Russian products that are in demand in the United States.

The engines are manufactured by the Energomash Russian power engineering corporation.

In the United States, the RD Amross joint venture adapts the engines for use in the heavy Atlas-V launch systems.

RD-180 rocket engines is one half of the RD-170 four-nozzle engine, which was designed for the first stage of the Energiaheavy-lift expandable launch system decades ago.

In 1996, the RD-180 project won the tender for developing and delivering the first stage engine for an updated PH Atlas rocket, manufactured by the US Lockheed Martin Corporation.

The development of the engine, based on the series-produced RD-170/171, helped Energomash survive the hardest years for Russian rocket-building companies, - from the mid-1990s to the mid-zeros.

An agreement was signed in 1997 on the delivery to the United States of 101 RD-180 rocket engines until the end of 2018.

By late last year, Energomash had supplied to the US more than 70 rocket engines for 10 million dollars each, which accounted for a sizeable part of the corporation's revenues, - more than a third, according to some estimates.

Given that the supply of engines to the home market yielded hardly any profit at the time, it is safe to claim that the RD-180 rocket engines programme kept the corporation out of bankruptcy.

ATLAS EELV Family

Political complications
The agreement with the United States has been performed by 75% (?).

However, the US is not about to stop using its Atlas rockets, which will call for extending the agreement.

Russia considered the cessation of deliveries of RD-180 rocket engines to the United States in summer 2013 since the US has been using its Atlas-V launch systems to place defence-related devices into orbit.

Although no decision was made, but the fact that Russia considered stopping supplies, the US decided to overhaul its space launch programme.

According to one option, Washington could launch the series licensed production of RD-180 rocket engines in the United States but the option obviously suffers from a couple of flaws; the cost of the engine is estimated to grow by approximately 50% and; a licensed agreement per se and the supply of key engine components from Russia call for trust-based relations between the two countries.

The full-cycle production of RD-180 rocket engines in the United States would prove a guarantee against any risks, of course, but Russia is hardly prepared to accept that and, besides, the expenditures will be comparable to the spending on the designing of a new engine.

Spacesuit fitting for Alan Shepard

Spacesuit fitting for Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut; Shepard winched aboard a helicopter after splashdown of the Freedom 7 capsule, Mercury-Atlas 4, 1960 and 5 May 1961.

Credit: Bloomsbury Auctions

MUOS-1 Satellite Launched on Atlas 5 Rocket

Credit: Pat Corkery, United Launch Alliance

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket blasts off from Space Launch Complex-41 at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Feb. 24, 2012, with the U.S. Navy’s Mobile User Objective System-1 (MUOS-1) satellite.

At nearly 15,000 pounds, MUOS-1 marks the heaviest satellite launched to date by an Atlas launch vehicle.

Cargo spaceship HTV, meets the ISS catcher in the sky

If the first launch of Japan's new heavy-lifting rocket passes without incident this month, the residents of the International Space Station will soon be taking delivery of food, water, some spanking new laptops, a robot arm and a couple of Earth-observing experiments.

Business as usual, you might think, except that the way this particular cargo gets to its destination is subtly different to its predecessors.

The reason? The cargo is being carried by the latest uncrewed spacecraft to vie for a place in the emerging market to supply the ISS. The driving force behind this latest space race is the impending retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet, sometime in 2010.

This latest vehicle is the work of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. JAXA's H-II Transfer Vehicle, or HTV, offers the space station a range of new capabilities.

First flight nerves
HTV is scheduled for lift-off sometime between 10 September and the end of the month, on board the HII-B launch vehicle, which has never flown before – and the record of successful first rocket launches is poor. For instance, the giant Ariane 5, which carries ESA's ATV, failed to launch several times before the glitches in the technology were finally ironed out.

A variant of JAXA's workhorse HII-A rocket, the HII-B has four solid rocket boosters instead of the HII-A's two – and has two main liquid-fuelled engines instead of the HII-A's one.

"This is indeed the HII-B's first launch. But many of the components are already working well on the HII-A," says Miyake. "We have great confidence in it."

Inflatable Heat Shield Tested in Space

An inflatable heat shield was successfully tested on Monday, demonstrating for the first time that these light, flexible devices could be used to protect spacecraft on their way through planets' atmospheres.

Other spacecraft use solid heat shields that either drop away as the spacecraft near the surface, as happened with the Mars rovers, or gradually erode in the atmosphere.

These solid shields are heavy, and their weight limits the mass of the spacecraft they are designed to protect, since both must launch on the same rocket. Their physical size is also limiting, since the shields must be small enough to fit inside a launch rocket.

Balloon-like shields can in theory sidestep these issues, since they are lightweight and can inflate to relatively large sizes after being folded up during launch. These weight and size savings allow for heavier spacecraft payloads.

The new shield, called the Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE), launched aboard a small rocket on Monday morning from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. It was the first successful test of an inflatable heat shield.

"We're totally thrilled with the data results we've received," says project manager Mary-Beth Wusk of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

Moon Missions Launched: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Crater Observation

NASA launched a pair of moon missions, the agency's first in more than 10 years, on Thursday. Intended to pave the way for the return of astronauts to the lunar surface, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will map the moon in 3D, focusing on 50 'high priority' locations that are thought to be prime landing sites.

A second mission called the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite will orbit Earth for about 100 days before it guides the spent upper stage of the Atlas V launch vehicle into a collision with a crater on the moon's south pole.

The blast is expected to excavate more than 350 tonnes of material and could reveal whether the polar craters contain water ice, which could be used by future lunar colonists. (Image: United Launch Alliance/Pat Corkery)