The White House took issue with the 2015 defense spending bill drafted by a House panel, which sets aside $220 million for the engine.
The subcommittee’s draft forms the backbone of the defense spending bill that is expected to be marked up by the full House Appropriations Committee June 10.
In the wake of a blue-ribbon panel’s report urging the U.S. government to develop a domestic replacement for the Russian-built RD-180 rocket engine, the Senate Armed Services Committee drafted a 2015 defense authorization bill that provides $100 million for that purpose.
Senior U.S. military space leaders told a House subcommittee they backed the idea of developing an American-made alternative to the Russian-made RD-180.
Blue Origin completed a full-duration burn of a liquid hydrogen-fueled engine developed for the New Shepard suborbital spaceship and planned orbital vehicles.
China has successfully test-fired the rocket engine that will power the next-generation heavy-lift booster, the Long March 5.
The British government has agreed to invest 60 million British pounds in a company developing an air-breathing rocket engine.
Competition is latest evidence of growing interest in using 3-D-printing to produce space technology.
PARIS — France’s Safran said April 30 it has completed the merger of SME, formerly a subsidiary of the state-owned SNPE, and Safran’s own Snecma Solid Propulsion division into Europe’s foremost solid-rocket propulsion specialist, to be known as Herakles.
The Russian Comptroller's Office has accused the engineering firm NPO Energomash of selling RD-180 rocket engines to the United States at half their production cost, Russia's RIA Novosti news agency reported May 11.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force is beginning to weigh options for developing a more capable and affordable upper-stage engine for the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets the service uses to launch most national security payloads.
WASHINGTON — With a new presidential mandate to settle on a heavy-lift rocket design no later than 2015, NASA plans to complete by June 21 a study examining the feasibility of a common main engine for rockets that would launch civil, commercial and national security payloads, according to officials with the space agency.
WASHINGTON — NASA is considering using some of the $3.1 billion it is requesting for heavy-lift and in-space propulsion research to develop a U.S. counterpart to the Russian-built RD-180 engine that powers the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, according to new budget documents the U.S. space agency released Feb. 22.
XCOR Aerospace said Sept. 2 it had reached several significant milestones in its Lynx 5K18 rocket engine test program.
