RUSSIA: Russia Supplies U.S. With Rocket Engines

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Andrei Ivanov

MOSCOW, Mar 17 1996 (IPS) - Not only the Cold War, but the Space Race is now officially over. The United States’ largest missile manufacturers are turning to Russian rocket scientists to drive a new generation of U.S. satellite boosters.

The Valentin Glushko Energomash Science and Production Association in the town of Khimki near Moscow has won a tender to supply the U.S. space company Lockheed-Martin with rocket engines for its Atlas 2AR new-generation booster.

The new RD-180 engine has been developed under a joint venture with the U.S. company Pratt and Whitney and is a modification of the RD-170 engine currently used in the Russian Zenith and Energiya boosters., Pratt and Whitney, part of United Technologies, has invested 150 million dollars in Energomash.

Until recently it was assumed that the contract would go to another Russian concern — the Samara-based Dvigateli NK Science and Engineering Complex which had offered its NK-33 rocket engine, originally developed for the Soviet Moon programme in the 1970s but subsequently mothballed.

The only U.S. participant in the tender was Rocketdyne, a division of Rockwell International, but its engine had not gone beyond the technical design stage.

Dvigateli NK has 72 NK-33s in mint condition and tests in California had found them suitable for use in U.S. boosters. It had been working closely with the struggling U.S. company Aerojet, and had agreed to sell the 72 engines for 1.1 million dollars each in addition to five million dollars for a licence to make them in the United States.

In contrast the Energomash RD-180s instead were selling at 30- 40 million dollars each. “Production of RD-180 engines in Russia would bring in orders worth around one billion dollars over 20 years,” estimated a senior defence ministry official.

However, in December the Russian Defence Ministry blocked the deal until the contract had been vetted for security and commercial failings. The deal passed the security test by failed a vetting on commercial viability.

A senior Ministry official said the price failed to even meet the production costs of the engines. “Moreover five million dollars for a licence is absurd — such high-level technology should cost 100-150 million dollars,” he added.

There has been much frustration with U.S. objections to the sale of rocket technology to countries like India, in which disarmament treaties have been cited in exchanges that Moscow regarded as bare- faced efforts to keep Russian space technology traders out of a competitive market.

But after tinkering with the terms in March the deal was approved by the defence ministry. Twelve of Dvigateli NK stock NK-33s will shortly be dispatched to the U.S. and Aerojet has agreed, among other things, to pay up the whole price of the engines upon delivery and not just 20 percent as agreed earlier — though the sale price will remain at a million dollars each.

The license arrangements have been extended to allow Russia’ s Space Agency — which had earlier backed the RD-180 deal over the NK-33 contract — and which had a hand in developing both engine, a share of profits from the NK-33 licence’s sale.

United Technologies is already busy in Russia; aside from installing new elevators in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral, its Pratt and Whitney division is installing its engines on Russia’s new Tupolev Tu-204 and Ilyushin Il-96-300 jetliners.

This also brings Energomash again into competition with Dvigateli NK which is producing its own aircraft engine — the NK-93 which can reportedly outperform just about any U.S.-made engine. Seven have been produced to date, but the Russian federal budget has no money to offer in support.

It plans to use the proceeds of the sale of the NK-33 rocket engines to fund the entire NK-93 R&D effort. Dvigateli NK and Aerojet are also hoping that the NK-33 engine will be installed on U.S. Delta satellite boosters.

But the competition will not stop there in a multi-billion dollar market. “Energomash has every intention of expanding its presence on the U.S. market,” says one company official. Last year it established a joint venture with Pratt and Whitney to sell another rocket engine in the U.S. — the RD-120M, a modified version of the RD-120.

Tests were carried out on the engine in the U.S. late last year. It is intended to use the RD-120 as a booster for light rockets used for putting into orbit communications and telemetry satellites and research craft weighing up to 500 kilogrammes.

Russia and the U.S. have deals in mind that could yet see them allied in an effort to break the European stranglehold on commercial space satellite launches. The mainly French Arianespace concern currently handles up to 60 percent of commercial launches world wide, a business worth an estimated 1.5 billion dollars a year.

Lockheed Martin and Russia’s Khrunichev and Energia space companies have a joint venture to launch commercial satellites starting this month, Boeing, with Energia and Ukraine’s Yuzhnoye missile producer, will launch commercial satellites from ships starting in 1998, and Loral, Energia, and Russia’s Gazprom gas monopoly will launch low-cost communications satellites starting next year.