Senate shoots down Russian rocket engines

For more than a decade, the United States military has depended on buying Russian-made rocket engines to launch its most crucial satellites. On Friday, Congress said no more.

Despite lobbying from a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., the Senate voted 89-11 to approve a bill Friday that would ban the Pentagon from awarding future rocket launch contracts to firms using Russian engines.

The ban is a blow to the Boeing-Lockheed venture called United Launch Alliance, which has relied on using the Russian engines under an exclusive and expensive deal it has had with the Air Force since 2006.

It is a victory, however, for aerospace upstart SpaceX, which wants some of the Air Force’s satellite launching business. SpaceX, also known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., designs and manufactures its own rocket engines at its factory in Hawthorne, California, near Los Angeles International Airport.

Lockheed, and later the joint venture it formed with Boeing, has been using the Russian rocket engines for military and commercial launches since 2000. Some American aerospace engineers contend the powerful engines, which burn liquid oxygen and kerosene, are the world’s best.

The ban on Russian rocket engines is part of a massive bill, known as the National Defense Authorization Act, that authorizes $580 billion in Pentagon spending during the next year. Among its scores of provisions are cuts to military health benefits, continued funding of the Air Force’s A-10 Warthog aircraft – marked for retirement – and the authorization of a stepped-up campaign against Islamic State militants.

The measure already has passed the House and is now headed for the expected signature of President Barack Obama.

The defense bill was one of the few in which congressional members of both parties came together.

And they made it clear in the bill’s language that they wanted the Air Force to stop relying on space technology built by Russia – a country that became a renewed military threat with its annexation of Crimea and its support of separatists in the Ukraine.

The bill notes that it is “the sense of Congress” that American national security space systems “are facing a serious growing foreign threat” from both Russia and China.

And it calls on the secretary of defense to develop “a next-generation” rocket engine by 2019 that would be “made in the United States.”

United Launch Alliance succeeded at weakening the bill so that it is allowed to use the Russian engines already in its inventory, which it says is enough for military launches during the next two years.

The bill also allows the joint venture to use the Russian engines – known as the RD-180 – it previously ordered from its Russian supplier. The company said Friday that it had 29 engines on order, including five that already have been delivered.