Lockheed Martin has stunned the space industry with an exclusive deal to buy 101 Russian RD-180 rocket engines worth $1 billion.
The unprecedented purchase enforces the company's "…resolve to win the US Air Force's Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV)" contract next June, says Mel Brashears, president and chief executive officer of Lockheed's Space and Strategic Missiles Sector.
Design
Lockheed based its proposed design of the EELV on the Russian engine. The winner of the EELV contract will be the single-source supplier of boosters for 30 years, resulting in $40 billion of commercial launcher work.
Brashears described the 37% to 100% throttleable RD-180 - a derivative of the RD-170 that was used on the retired Energia booster and is being used on the Zenit - as the "greatest rocket engine in the world".
Lockheed will buy the engines from RD Amross, the joint venture of Russia's NPO Energomash and Pratt & Whitney. The deal mans that no other US company can buy the RD-180 engines.
They will be used for Lockheed's new Atlas A2AR satellite launcher, to be operated with the Russian company Khrunichev as ILS International Launch Services.
Four developmental engines have been successfully test-fired for a total of 2,000s and 10 will be tested for more than 20,000 before the first 2AR flight in December 1998.
Some of the 101 engines will also be used on any commercial missions made by any of the fleet of EELV vehicles, should Lockheed win the USAF contract.
P&W, which already fabricates parts of the RD-180 at an existing factory at West Palm Beach, Florida, will accelerate the building of its own RD-180.
Source: Flight International