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Comment by neverminder | Hacker News Reader

I always found ULA's reliance on Russian engines absolutely ridiculous. If they don't have their own engines they have no business being a launch provider. Apart from SpaceX, USA's launch capabilities for the past decade are in complete shambles.

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My understanding is that we started buying them not because we necessarily needed Russian engines, but because there was worry that the collapse of the USSR would lead to a glut of unemployed Russian rocket engineers who would start offering their services to Iraq/Iran/N Korea/etc. Dunno how well the program worked in practice, but it seems like a good concept.

This makes total sense.

Compared to USA setting up facilities on US soil for domestic needs and providing employment to them in those facilities ensuring that they become part of US aerospace infrastructure and bring know-how/self-reliance?

This reasoning never made sense to me. We always could have hired them directly, offer them relocation or simply set up a subsidiary of an American company in Russia to keep them busy.

Don't just assume that people will move at the drop of a hat. Some people are happy to move around in their early adulthood (20s,) but once children and a significant other are involved, moving isn't appealing.

Also, many Russians are happy with typical middle class life in Russia. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, typical middle class life in Russia was very good.

> Don't just assume that people will move at the drop of a hat.

Same reason why they won't move to Iran or N Korea.

You also have to consider that they don’t want to move to the US specificly due to ideological reasons. How many who don’t currently live in Russia would love to move there if their profession was no longer needed in the US? Same thing applies the other way around.

people act in their own self interest, that doesn't mean self interest is simple

Maybe North Korea offers them more money?

Maybe Russia has a backdoor deal to have their scientists develop something 'for russia' that people know goes out the backdoor to

Maybe Russia forces them to work on things or they will hurt their families.

Maybe Russia won't let them leave and they are going to do worse things for money unless we keep them employed.

Maybe they hate the US and want to work for their enemies

HN often gets very reductive on why people make the decisions they do. Especially when those are related to decisions made by 'traditional' companies and state actors. Lets not assume that the entirety of the US state department and ULA aren't well informed about the decisions they are making.

I read in Command and Control that the Russian government narrowly managed to block a plane full of Russian weapons designers from heading to North Korea during the collapse of the USSR. There were brilliant scientists trying and failing to grow potatoes in their back yard because food was scarce. Moving beats dying of hunger.

On pretty much any metric that matters life is worse for the typical Russian citizen today as compared with before the collapse of the USSR. Educational attainment, lifespan, gender equity, homelessness rates, nutrition

I'm not sure why people bring up that time as if it were somehow worse, turns out selling off all your public institutions to corporations at firesale prices isn't a good foundation for democracy. Many of those oligarchs that made out well became the powerbase of Putin, whom MI6 funded and supported.

The West creates its own monsters

You somehow blame the west for Putin? Other countries have managed.

India has better average wages than Russia.

The quality of life issues in the Soviet Union are well known. All you need to do is read the Wikipedia page on the fall of the Soviet Union.

So why don't they have R&D branch in Russia?

Just paying people to keep doing what they're doing is going to be massively easier, and have a lot more uptake, then trying to move everyone over to some new company. Plus there's no guarantee you'd get enough of the original company to actually keep producing engines.

Hiring then would have been outright punishment. America is more about everyone being self sufficient and most importantly, being a good trading partner. We think free trade is essential to prosperity.

Remember that America spent billions of dollars on Europe and Asia after WW2 on reconstruction. Now America has some great allies (Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc.) all backed by consistent and reliable trade.

When the USSR collapsed, America was kind of hoping they’d join the club. America literally thinks the club is really cool and everyone should be a part of it.

Buying engines from Russia was about showing how trade is awesome and how both parties could benefit.

America only invested because they thought these countries would turn to communism otherwise. We don't do things out of the goodness of our hearts.

Doesn't seem like we support free trade either when we've had wars over forcing other countries to let us sell Opium to their populace. At other times though like WW2 when our allies asked us to stop selling things to the third Reich all we cared about was free trade. Almost like it's a political football for whatever interests are more relevant to the American ruling class at a given point in time.

The conflict today could have been potentially avoided had the West prioritized a democratic Russia vs one friendly to Western business interests. Instead our intelligence agencies funded and supported Putin, and encouraged him to brutally crack down on dissidents. We reap what we sow. Just a modern-day Pinochet

I am not a rocket expert or anything, but my understanding is that Russian engines back in the early 1990s were more efficient. I remember seeing some kind of documentary on it. I think that it was also cheaper than building American engines, because there was a large stockpile of unused engines in Russia.

The documentary was likely "The Engines that Came in from the Cold." And yeah, those RD-180 engines were a bit shocking to US engineers at first. I suspect there were several reasons that attracted the US to buying them, price being a big one.

That was the documentary indeed!

The RD-180 is still by many measures the best engine that has been to orbit. SpaceX Raptor is putting up better numbers but so far has only flown short hops and test stands.

Cheaper and smarter to just hire them and give them free green cards.

NASA was born in large part from all the German scientist and engineers we wiped after the war.

The German scientists that came to the US after WWII were trying to avoid "going" to Russia or staying in post-war Germany.

If these scientists are mostly happy in Russia, neither applies.

This logic was one of the reasons the Shuttle/Mir missions happened as well.

As I understand it, it was largely due to the superior efficiency of the Russian engines over the bulk of US engines, at a vastly better price than the US options of the time. Then institutional inertia takes over as switching rocket engines is apparently not just a trivial switch for a rocket design (but IANARS).

> If they don't have their own engines they have no business being a launch provider

I dont really agree with this line to be honest, making rocket engines is hard, and if you only "deserved" to be in business as a launch provider if you made your own engines, our medium/heavy lift launch capabilities would be even worse than they currently are. There is nothing wrong with buying engines from someone else, Id say its a good way to make sure we have multiple different launch vehicles.

Maybe you have a point with buying them from Russia specifically, but until very recently, it was basically the only sensible option since American made engines didnt really fit the requirements super well. The RD engines are extremely good for what they are.

Only in the last yearish did it make sense to start getting rid of the Russian engines, as we finally have some larger American made ones coming online.

Id love to see more American made engines, but without major government investments, I dont really see it happening outside of SpaceX/Blue Origin.

> If they don't have their own engines they have no business being a launch provider

Until recently, SpaceX was generally the exception as a more vertically integrated company that makes their own engines. Not that it is necessarily a better or worse position (although Russian engines is probably the worse position) but it is common for launch providers

Delta IV: Aerojet Rocketdyne engines

Atlas V: Russian, Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrup (formerly ATK) engines

Pegasus: Okay, this one is all one company now, but that is because Orbital and ATK merged (and then got bought by Northrup)

Ariane 5: Safran Aircraft, Snecma

It's not that they have failed as much as it is a strategic decision. ULA is not doing this by choice, they are doing it (as mentioned) to effectively subsidize the industry in Russia for other diplomatic and security reasons as opposed to technical reasons. [0]

"The [US government] asked us to buy [Russian engines] at the end of the Cold War in order to keep the Russian Rocket Scientists from ending up in North Korea and Iran," ~ tweet from ULA's CEO

ULA is in the process of replacing the russian engines as part of the shift to their Vulcan rocket and away from Atlas. I believe they have all the rockets they need in hand.

ETA: and to be explicit, they are not paying the scientists and engineers directly. They are paying the russian firms doing the work.

[0] https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/US_Rocketry_Chief_Offers_...

The Cold War ended 30+ years ago.

They licensed the RD-180 for domestic production, Aerojet/RD/LM whatever took billions in R&D to do it and then punted because they were too lazy or incompetent (probably both) to actually do it.

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2014/7/1/20...

They then went and asked for more money to use Bezos’ BE-4. Tell us how that has worked out…

oh this is also very true.

Yeah, at least we can say that we did see this coming at some point. It was shortly after the annexation of Crimea that Congress said you need to stop using Russian rocket engines and ULA started working on the Vulcan rocket.

Not so long ago relations were not as bad as it's today.

Everything has changed during the last 20 years.

completely agree

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