Pentagon officials will head to Capitol Hill next week to testify on the military space program’s use of Russian-made rocket engines, a key sticking point for senators in last year’s omnibus bill.
The Senate Armed Services Committee is holding a hearing on Wednesday where Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James and Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, are expected to testify.
The U.S. has two private contractors capable of filling the Air Force’s space launch requirements: United Launch Alliance, which is a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and SpaceX. While SpaceX produces its own rockets, United Launch Alliance still relies on the Russian-made RD-180 engines.
The Russian invasion of Crimea spurred Congress to ban all U.S. launch companies from using Russian-made engines after 2019.
When ULA threatened to pull out of a contract competition because of the ban, the Air Force asked Congress to move back the date of the ban, noting that designing and building a new engine is a lengthy process. Officials stressed that prohibiting ULA from using the Russian-made rockets would eliminate competition and drive up costs 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,” James said at a National Press Club Luncheon last month. “The controversy is how quickly can we get it done and it turns out this really is rocket science.”
The Air Force eventually got its way. The fiscal 2016 omnibus spending bill passed late last year temporarily lifted the ban, giving ULA more time to rely on Russian-made rockets while it designs its own system.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee, had been a key player in extending how long U.S. companies could purchase Russian engines. ULA, which relies on the engines to compete for government contracts, is based in his home state.
But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been an outspoken critic of any reliance on Russia and voted against the omnibus bill as a whole because of this provision.
“As Russia occupies Crimea, destabilizes Ukraine, menaces our NATO allies, and bombs U.S.-backed forces in Syria, the omnibus includes a provision allowing a single U.S. company to spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying Russian-made rocket engines from Vladimir Putin and his cronies,” McCain said in a statement last month.
