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‘Shame on Boeing’: Elon Musk hails Russian-made rocket engine’s design as ‘brilliant’

JacksinPA

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https://www.rt.com/usa/447249-elon-musk-rd-180/

SpaceX founder Elon Musk praised the Russian-built RD-180 rocket engine for looking awesome but said his bitter rivals Lockheed and Boeing ought to be ashamed of using it during their launches.

The eccentric tech billionaire said a few nice words about the RD-180 on Twitter, while mocking his competitors at the same time. “It’s embarrassing that Boeing and Lockheed need to use a Russian engine on Atlas,” the rocket-maker wrote on Saturday “but that engine design is brilliant.”
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See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180

Boeing & Lockheed have been using Russian rocket engines to power their rocket launches of satellites. These engines were originally based on designs for huge Russian rockets destined to reach the Moon. While the Soviets ordered the equipment destroyed after a major disaster, one manufacturer maintained a stock of these in a warehouse & are now selling them to U.S. companies for big $$$. IOW, the United States is now second in space, not the leader that reached the Moon in 1969, 50 years ago. This was the earlier design named NK-33: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33

There is a documentary film on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMbl_ofF3AM
 
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PR for Russia in Russia's propaganda machine Russia Today (RT)? Amazing.

/sarcasm

Musk has been making some bad choices in public displays lately. I get that he wants to embarrass his competitors and that Boeing and Lockheed shouldn't be using Russian engines. They should be producing their own tech rather than relying on a country that is a foe of this country. Not that this statement by Musk is especially bad compared to smoking pot on a podcast, because what he said seems to also be true, but the optics of singing Russia's praises while the Trump fiasco is going on, may be another example of a bad choice at least in timing. It may backfire on Musk, rather than have the negative effect on his competitors that I'm sure was his motivation.

PS: on this one, I agree with Musk. Shame on Boeing.
 
That this country depends on Russian-made rocket engines is a shame. Someone dropped the ball on this big time. You won't find it on your 'approved' Right Wing news sources but that's why RT sometimes shines through with the truth our leaders hide from us.
 

In 2010, the Obama administration said it wanted to make development of a 1 million pound-thrust, closed-loop kerosene-fueled engine a national priority. However, Congress preferred a new rocket based on shuttle-derived systems, and the White House had to compromise.

I sense that a lot of the anti-Obama agitprop about his lack of enthusiasm for space exploration was meant to diffuse any criticism that might arise if the public learned that they had nixed his ideas for an All-American rocket engine design.

 
One thing a like about Musk is that he has no more patience then I do for America's "We cant do it" mentality. A lot of Americas decline is due to shear lack of effort.
 

Congress making a science, engineering, and business decision?
Well, there's your problem.
Congress is completely unfamiliar with any of those subjects.
 

Red:
I'm in no position to say that's absolutely not so, but I can say that the notion that an engine manufacturer keeps finished goods, engines, sitting in a warehouse in much the same way, say, Amazon does strains credulity because such items are usually ATO (if not BTS) produced rather than MTS. That said, I'm aware too that Soviet firms had a habit of building things nobody wanted. Maybe that's what transpired with regard to the noted engines, but it's still hard to imagine that being so in this day and age.
 
Once the RS-25 comes online Russian engines will be abandoned.
 
eohrnberger said:
Congress making a science, engineering, and business decision?
Well, there's your problem.
Congress is completely unfamiliar with any of those subjects.
Click to expand...

No, Congress wasn't making anything but a money decision, just like they did when they appropriated funds to send astronauts to the Moon.
The experts told Congress it was appropriate back then, and I am sure that experts told staffers what they needed to know this last time, too.
Congress decided to hamstring any American efforts to achieve parity and Russia is now in top spot as a result.
Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans wasted no time criticizing Obama's supposedly lukewarm approach to space, when in reality they were the ones who weren't interested.

And the criticism continued all the way into the last year of Obama's administration and beyond, including some piling on by, of all people, a former Lockheed executive.


So, Congress couldn't see fit to contributing any money to develop rocket engines which would free us from dependency on the Russians, but it seems eager to make Obama look bad. Yup, Republican business as usual!
 

Did you watch that documentary film I linked? Go to 29:16 to see that warehouse full of rocket engines. The guy who ran that design bureau said to himself 'What a waste' & kept all those engines in a sealed building unknown to Soviet authorities. So much for centrally planned economies.
 
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JacksinPA said:
Did you watch that documentary film I linked? The guy who ran that design bureau said to himself 'What a waste' & kept all those engines in a sealed building unknown to Soviet authorities. So much for centrally planned economies.
Click to expand...

I haven't watched the video.

I guess they did indeed build and stock rocket engines as though they were cheap commodity goods. The guy's right. What a waste.
 
Xelor said:
I haven't watched the video.

I guess they did indeed build and stock rocket engines as though they were cheap commodity goods. The guy's right. What a waste.
Click to expand...

This closed-loop design was revolutionary. He saved them for a rainy day. Then it started raining...but here in America.

I have had the idea of getting natural gas from Russia via a pipeline under the Bering Straits. Bad idea because we would become dependent on them. Now we are dependent on them for rocket engines. Stupid.
 
Xelor said:
I haven't watched the video.

I guess they did indeed build and stock rocket engines as though they were cheap commodity goods. The guy's right. What a waste.
Click to expand...

I think I found it on Netflix. Title: The Engines That Came In From The Cold - And how The NK-33/RD-180 Came To The USA No kidding. At 29.26 you see the warehouse full of shiny rocket engines in storage waiting for U.S. buyers. Putin must be laughing his donkey off.
 

DC is full of '**** your buddy'.

"Congress wasn't making anything but a money decision"
And got it wrong (as usual) because they have no idea how to deal with money, as the soaring national debt plays testament to.
 
https://www.rt.com/usa/447249-elon-musk-rd-180/

The RD-180 was developed by NPO Energomash in the 1990s, based on an older Soviet model, RD-170. Since the early-2000s, the Colorado-based United Launch Alliance (ULA), jointly run by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has been using the engine to power the first stages of its Atlas carrier rockets, including Atlas V.

The design Musk likes so much is not its only great feature. The ULA website calls RD-180 “a powerful combination of innovation and performance.” A research paper published by the company in 2011 described it as an “efficient, reliable engine,” that was “unmatched” among its competitors and “specifically tailored” for the Atlas family.

Overall, the Russian-built engine has been used in over 75 launches across the US, including in 2011 when NASA sent the Curiosity rover to Mars.

The reliance on RD-180 tech also landed the ULA in hot water as politicians grew increasingly wary of its dependence on Moscow. In 2016, Congress mandated the companies to phase out the use of the engine by 2022.
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I haven't found what we pay for each of these engines but I'm sure the figure contains at least 6 zeroes. Times 75 = lots of greenbacks in a deep vault in the Kremlin.
 
eohrnberger said:
DC is full of '**** your buddy'.

"Congress wasn't making anything but a money decision"
And got it wrong (as usual) because they have no idea how to deal with money, as the soaring national debt plays testament to.
Click to expand...

Spewing fact free and overly emotional anti-government blather isn't helping you much.
 
Xelor said:
I haven't watched the video.

I guess they did indeed build and stock rocket engines as though they were cheap commodity goods. The guy's right. What a waste.
Click to expand...

I'll have to look at the video again but I think it was a crash program that got cancelled due to a bad accident at the cosmodrome. Everything was ordered destroyed but he held on to these. Smart move but also very brave in the era of the KGB when everyone was spying on everyone else.

 
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Okay, but I was willing to accept that the Russians/Soviets used an MTS model (or something very near to it) for their rocket engine production. As I wrote before, I agree with the guy in the other video you noted, that doing so was, to put it kindly, wasteful.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
One thing a like about Musk is that he has no more patience then I do for America's "We cant do it" mentality. A lot of Americas decline is due to shear lack of effort.
Click to expand...

What I like about Musk is that he does things. Most billionaires just try to sit the money in investments for interest. Musk builds, runs things hands on, creates markets following his dreams, and seems to have sound moral principles. SpaceX, Tesla, Tunnels, Solar City, Lithium batteries, working to fix the Planet and getting into space if he can't.
/
 

That is what the Greats do you know, they decide what needs to be done or what can be done....and then they go do it.

They dont listen to all of the yap from the inferior in their ear.... they learn first and then learn to trust their judgment, then they decide, then they do.










There are damn few Greats anymore.
 
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