The fight in Congress over whether to allow the Air Force to continue using Russian engines to launch satellites into space may be more related to lawmakers’ interests in their home states than anti-Russian sentiments, analysts said.
The U.S. has two private contractors capable of launching military satellites: SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which until recently had a monopoly in military launches.
But ULA relies on the Russian-made RD-180 engine for its launches. SpaceX, however, has its own technology and does not need the Russian engines.
After relations between the U.S. and Russia cooled when President Vladimir Putin annexed the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine in 2014, officials decided the U.S. could no longer rely on Russia for this technology and said the U.S. could not buy any more engines after 2019. Because of that, ULA in November withdrew its bid for the GPS III launch services competition, saying it couldn’t come up with a new engine to meet that deadline.
The Air Force, however, has asked for that date to be pushed back in order to allow for more competition among companies and a better deal for the government.
“One hundred percent of us both in the executive branch and in Congress, we want to get off of the reliance on this RD-180 engine,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said at a National Press Club Luncheon this week. “The controversy is how quickly can we get it done and it turns out this really is rocket science.”
Lawmakers are now dealing with whether they will move the deadline via the fiscal 2016 defense appropriations bill. Justin Johnson, a defense analyst with the Heritage Foundation, said the fight has largely played out between delegations from California, where SpaceX is based, and United Launch Alliance, which is in Alabama.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala. and a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee, has been leading the charge to extend how long U.S. companies can buy the Russian engine. ULA, based in his home state, relies on the foreign engines to compete for government launch contracts.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has been one of the voices staunchly opposed to extending the deadline, but his position as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee does not give him much influence over the appropriations process, Johnson said.
Other members of Senate Appropriations have been unwilling to speak about what role the debate over the RD-180 will play in the omnibus appropriations negotiations.
Analysts said they expected debate over the rocket engines to not play a major role in the success of the omnibus spending bill and said an extension on the 2019 deadline is likely, though it may not happen in this year’s bill.
“I think the likelihood is good that this restriction will be loosened the closer we get to the 2018 bidding process,” said Michael Kofman, a fellow at the Wilson Center, referring to bids for follow-on launches. “It is simply unlikely that SpaceX will be able to fill the Air Force’s needs between those and other national security satellite launch missions, and having the traditional bidder, ULA, excluded is simply unrealistic.”
Recent aggression by Russia has further strained its relationship with the U.S., including an incursion into Turkish airspace during which Turkey shot down a Russian jet, killing a pilot.
But analysts said these events don’t play a major role in turning the tide of the debate on the RD-180 weapons, since they have nothing to do with the Air Force request for more time to develop a U.S.-made rocket.
“Russian behavior has an impact to the extent it validates or undermines the position of those determined to kill RD-180 imports as a response to Moscow’s actions in Ukraine, and now Syria. However, these do not speak to Air Force requirements, which are quite real and independent of politics,” Kofman said.
While Johnson agreed that current events haven’t played a major role in this debate, he said there would be little the U.S. could do to speed up the process of building its own engine either way.
“I think the recent actions and incursion into Turkey … reinforce the need to not be solely reliant on Russia for these rocket engines, but there’s not much the U.S. government or U.S. military can do to accelerate the path to move away from [using them],” he said. “The process is ongoing, but not a simple one.”