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Comment by kindredlight | Hacker News Reader

All Atlas V first-stage engines (RD-180) are manufactured in Russia. That the second stage engines are made in the US doesn't change the fact that you're dependent on Russian supply.

In response to your edits:

>but they can't get more flights because of their record

The Air Force required 3 successful flights in the exact configuration the Air Force would fly. SpaceX provided the "record" as stipulated by the Air Force, which nevertheless committed to a large block-buy contract with ULA. By the Air Force's own standards, the billion-dollar subsidy is not necessary for their needs-to-get-to-space payloads.

Also, "the other companies" is just a single supplier, ULA.

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I've heard it's a common practice in defense contracts to carefully write the requirements such that you are in effect pre-selecting your desired vendor, while providing the appearance of impartiality and neutrality.

That's common I think in just about every government procurement deal. In higher ed we would choose the service or software we wanted to buy. then write the procurement request to fit that product. And in many cases the vendors that deal with Higher ed and government contracts, provide guidance with writing the request.

Yes, it's called "wiring" a contract. When I worked at a company that sold specialized processors to the government we ran into that all the time. Usually it was something defensible on its face, at least, like software compatibility with a previous piece of hardware.

But sometimes we would see unimaginative stuff like a specification of the LED layout on the front panel or very specific weight restrictions that happened to fall between our hardware and the preferred vendor.

In the government's defense, though, the system is set up to combat this tendency, at least for smaller contracts. When I was on the other side (having left the vendor to work for our civil service customer) we would routinely get pointed questions from the purchasing people regarding this or that line of the RFP - was it really required, or were we trying to wire the contract?

It's common in telecoms too. We get RFPs that are pretty much lifted from the spec page of a competitors (incumbent) product.

>you're dependent on Russian supply

and my understanding that this supply is limited to the what had already been manufactured long time ago. Beside the inventory issues, one can easy imagine Putin saying "bad Americans, no more gas ... err... rocket engines for you"

RD-180 are being manufactured continuously last ~20 years. All new, not manufactured long time ago.

NK-33 - from which AJ-26 are made - aren't manufactured today. It's a question if the manufacturing will restart. There are a few tens of them in US. Orbital Sciences has that question in the middle of their table, or close to it.

Russian-American relationships in space trace back to at least 1975, deep Cold War. We're not at that state of affairs just yet. As somebody mentioned on The Space Review, ISS is a front-runner for Nobel peace prize, so let's not jump the gun too early. It doesn't seem to be too desirable for Putin to close that particular relationship.

There is a successor NK-33A engine being produced for Russia's own Soyuz-2-1v. http://www.uk-odk.ru/eng/presscenter/odk_news/?ELEMENT_ID=20... http://www.samspace.ru/news/press_relizy/4228/ (in Russian)

Unfortunately engine itself is not produced. Those are all modifications of existing NK-33.

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