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United Launch Alliance put a classified U. S. military payload into orbit for the final time Tuesday with an Atlas V rocket, ending the Pentagon’s use of Russian rocket engines as it transitions national security missions to U. S. -only launchers. .
The Atlas V rocket lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida at 6:45 a. m. m. EDT (10:45 a. m. UTC) on Tuesday, powered by a Russian-made RD-180 engine and five solid-fuel thrusters in their strongest configuration. This is the 101st launch of an Atlas V rocket since its debut in 2002, and the 58th and final Atlas V project with a U. S. national security payload. Since 2007.
The U. S. Space Force’s Space Systems CommandThe U. S. Coast Guard showed off the good fortune of the mission, dubbed USSF-51, on Tuesday afternoon. The rocket’s top Centaur tier jettisoned the top-secret USSF-51 payload about seven hours after liftoff, most likely at a high level. geostationary altitude orbit over the equator. The military has released precise specifications of the rocket’s target orbit.
“What a fitting launch and conclusion to our newest National Security Space Atlas V (launch),” Walt Lauderdale, USSF-51 project manager at Space Systems Command, said in a post-launch news release. How well the Atlas V has fulfilled our wishes since we first introduced it in 2007 illustrates the toughness and determination of our country’s commercial foundation. Together we achieved this, and thanks to groups like this, we have maximum success and a successful launch industry. in the world, without exception. “
Tuesday morning’s launch marks the end of an era that began in the 1990s, when U. S. government policy allowed Lockheed Martin, the original developer of the Atlas V, to use Russian rocket engines in its first stage. In the first decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was widespread sentiment that the United States and other Western countries were partnering with Russia to keep the country’s aerospace personnel on the task and prevent “rogue states” like Iran or North Korea from hiring them.
At the time, the Pentagon was buying new rockets to upgrade earlier versions of the Atlas, Delta, and Titan rocket families, which had been in service since the late 1950s or early 1960s.
Eventually, the Air Force settled on Lockheed Martin’s Atlas V rocket and Boeing’s Delta IV rocket to progress in 1998. The Atlas V, with its main Russian engine, is slightly less expensive than the Delta IV and the more successful of the two models. Following Tuesday’s launch, another 15 Atlas V rockets are reserved to carry payloads for advertising consumers and NASA, primarily for Amazon’s Kuiper network and Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. The 45th and final launch of Delta IV took place in April.
Boeing and Lockheed Martin merged their rocket divisions in 2006 to form a 50:50 joint venture called United Launch Alliance, which has become the only contractor qualified to launch giant U. S. military satellites into orbit until SpaceX began launching rockets. National security missions in 2018.
SpaceX sued in 2014 to protest the Air Force’s decision to award ULA a multimillion-dollar sole-source contract for 36 Atlas V and Delta IV rocket booster cores. The dispute began shortly after Russia’s military run and annexation of Crimea, leading to US government sanctions against prominent Russian government officials, including then-Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and later the head of the agency. Russian space
Rogozin, known for his bellicose but sometimes toothless rhetoric, threatened to halt exports of RD-180 engines for U. S. Army missions on the Atlas V. This only happened when Russia, despite everything, suspended its engine exports to the United States in 2022, after its full control. Full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At that point, ULA already had all the engines it needed to fly all the remaining Atlas V rockets. This export ban had a major effect on Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, which also used Russian engines, forcing the development of an entirely new first rocket. Stage thruster supplied with American engines.
The SpaceX test, the Russian military’s first incursions into Ukraine in 2014, and the resulting sanctions marked the beginning of the end of the Atlas V rocket and the ULA’s use of the Russian RD-180 engine. The twin-nozzle RD-180, made by a Russian company called NPO Energomash, consumes kerosene and liquid oxygen and generates 860,000 pounds of thrust at full throttle.
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