ULA is getting green light

• #320 by Gus on 10 Nov, 2006 04:13
• Here is the Denver Post Article-
  
  http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_4569544
  
  And the pertinent quote - "Maguire said the company will be pleased if two-thirds of about 800 Boeing employees accept the offer. Lockheed's rocket assembly will move from Jefferson County to Decatur, Ala., but only a couple dozen of those jobs will transfer, she said."
  
  Propforce, what do you think the odds are on two thirds?
• #321 by Dexter on 10 Nov, 2006 05:58
• Quote

  R&R - 9/11/2006  8:16 PM
  
  

  Quote

  Dexter - 9/11/2006  11:26 PM
  
  Getting this thread back on topic:
  
  2 companies protest ULA; FTC decision expected soon on satellite rocket venture
  
  http://www.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/news/061103/rocket.shtml
  
  Down at the bottom there is this little gem,
  
  "Lockheed has said the merger would add hundreds of workers here, although a recent article in the Denver Post quoted a Lockheed official as saying "only a couple of dozen" Lockheed workers would move to Decatur."
  
  Couple of dozen would be 12 x 2 = 24.  That doesn't seem like a lot of people needed to build one of these things.  
  
  Why do they cost so much?
  

  
  They are making more of the Lokheed statement than what it really is.  Maybe only a couple dozen people will move to Decatur, can you blame the rest?  But the number of people does not mean the number of Jobs.  I don't know how many they have in Denver now but I'd guess 200 or more jobs will go to Decatur.  Less the couple dozen that means a lot of jobs to fill.  Unfortunately those that fill them probably won't have a tenth of the experience base.

  
  I agree.  
  
  The issue which has been repeatedly brought up in this thread is the risk to National Security based on the loss of critical skills.  This article is confirming the suspicion that ULA will be detrimental to National Security as was stated by the Office of Management and Budget at the White House.
• #322 by Dexter on 10 Nov, 2006 06:00

• Quote

  Propforce - 9/11/2006 9:32 PM
  
  
  I don't understand NG's complaint neither. Essentially NG (TRW) satellites are being launched by either LM or Boeing now, so how would the formation of ULA be any different. It would actually be safer as ULA is a separate company from LM or Boeing (Bo-Mart?).
  
  
  

   

  How about BLO(w)- MART?

• #323 by Dexter on 10 Nov, 2006 06:01
• Quote

  Gus - 9/11/2006  10:56 PM
  
  Here is the Denver Post Article-
  
  http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_4569544
  
  And the pertinent quote - "Maguire said the company will be pleased if two-thirds of about 800 Boeing employees accept the offer. Lockheed's rocket assembly will move from Jefferson County to Decatur, Ala., but only a couple dozen of those jobs will transfer, she said."
  
  Propforce, what do you think the odds are on two thirds?

  
  I'll bet less than a third.
• #324 by Dexter on 10 Nov, 2006 06:08
• Quote

  Propforce - 9/11/2006  12:29 AM
  
  

  Quote

  skywalker - 8/11/2006  8:34 PM
  
    Upper management does not really care about anything except getting ULA started because of the MICP (Management Incentive Compensation Plan).  

  
  Finally, a straight shooter around here and not a mouth piece for the customer.
  

  
  MICP sounds like a fancy way to say Bonus program.  Why would you give Bonuses on a money loosing program?
  
  What would happen to the cost of a rocket if you eliminated these bonuses?
  
  If national security is so important, why don't these executives/managers give up these bonuses instead of coming up with the ULA scheme?
• #325 by Propforce on 10 Nov, 2006 06:59
• Quote

  Gus - 9/11/2006  8:56 PM
  
  Here is the Denver Post Article-
  
  http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_4569544
  
  And the pertinent quote - "Maguire said the company will be pleased if two-thirds of about 800 Boeing employees accept the offer. Lockheed's rocket assembly will move from Jefferson County to Decatur, Ala., but only a couple dozen of those jobs will transfer, she said."
  
  Propforce, what do you think the odds are on two thirds?

  
  I'll have a better odd in wining that $100 million lottery than the ULA getting that 2/3 of Delta employees.
  
  
• #326 by Dexter on 11 Nov, 2006 19:10
• $100 Million.   There is that number again.
• #327 by Dexter on 11 Nov, 2006 21:18
• Quote

  yinzer - 8/11/2006  12:44 AM
  
  
  Americanized RD-180, no one cares enough about it to pay for the work.  The USAF and NRO claim to care, but by their failure to get Lockheed to take concrete action, I suspect that they are pretending to care to keep Congress of their back.  I also suspect that NASA only claimed to care as a way to justify the Stick.
  
  

  
  For your consideration on the argument on Americanized RD-180 production:
  
  http://www.americaneconomicalert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=461
  
  "During the Vietnam War, Sony withheld TV cameras used to guide tactical missiles.  In 1983, the Socialists in the Japanese Diet blocked the sale of ceramic packaging used in U.S. cruise missiles to protest Reagan administration policies.  Last year, the Bush administration approached Holland and Germany about selling submarines to Taiwan; both countries refused, citing policy differences.  And the gap between the United States and Europe on a host of foreign policy matters continue to widen. 1917 was a long time ago; and so was 1945; and even 1989"
  
  What happens to our assured accesss to space when the Russians decide to protest administration policies?
  
  
• #328 by Jim on 11 Nov, 2006 21:46
• Not quite the same.  LM has a stock pile of engines
• #329 by Dexter on 11 Nov, 2006 23:17
• So what happens when the stockpile runs out?
  
  What happens when there is a warranty issue or a need for technical support while the Russians are protesting administration policies?
• #330 by Gov't Seagull on 12 Nov, 2006 00:41
• Quote

  Dexter - 11/11/2006  7:00 PM
  
  So what happens when the stockpile runs out?
  
  What happens when there is a warranty issue or a need for technical support while the Russians are protesting administration policies?

  
  Efforts to produce the RD-180 in the U.S. have been accelerated a little over the past couple of years. Whether the Russians behave or not, we still can't get technical support, because of ITAR.  They can sell the engines to Lockheed, but they can't tell PWR how to build them, if that makes any sense. Likewise, ITAR prevents PWR from completely reverse-engineering the engines. If it wasn't for ITAR, I'd say let's reverse engineer the damn thing and tell the Russians it's payback for the B-29.
  
  I predict about one in five Boeing employees will move from Huntington Beach to Denver.
• #331 by hop on 12 Nov, 2006 01:41
• How does ITAR prevent a US company from reverse engineering the engines, or the Russians from telling them how to build them ? I could understand ITAR  preventing PW from re-exporting the RD-180 (including re-exporting it back to Russia!), or disclosing anything they learned about it, but I don't see why it would stop them from learning about it.
  
  It has been publicly reported that PW received and translated technical documentation for the RD-180. If this is true, surely it would have suffered the same problem ?
  
  I thought ITAR was to prevent sensitive technology going to other countries. I know the implementation of this has been very stupid at times, but I wasn't aware that it restricted importing foreign know how into the US.
• #332 by bombay on 12 Nov, 2006 02:17
• Quote

  hop - 11/11/2006  8:24 PM
  
  How does ITAR prevent a US company from reverse engineering the engines, or the Russians from telling them how to build them ? I could understand ITAR  preventing PW from re-exporting the RD-180 (including re-exporting it back to Russia!), or disclosing anything they learned about it, but I don't see why it would stop them from learning about it.
  
  It has been publicly reported that PW received and translated technical documentation for the RD-180. If this is true, surely it would have suffered the same problem ?
  
  I thought ITAR was to prevent sensitive technology going to other countries. I know the implementation of this has been very stupid at times, but I wasn't aware that it restricted importing foreign know how into the US.

  I'm in agreement with you.  I never understood ITAR to be a two-way street in terms of sharing military/sensitive technology.  If the U.S. were to obtain it either overtly or covertly to gain an advantage, why wouldn't they?
  
  Word through the grapevine is that PW has had the RD-180 drawings for quite some time and has built and tested various components but are still lots of years and several hundred million dollars of funding away from from anything resembling an Americanized version.
• #333 by Gov't Seagull on 12 Nov, 2006 03:16
• Quote

  bombay - 11/11/2006  10:00 PM
  
  Word through the grapevine is that PW has had the RD-180 drawings for quite some time and has built and tested various components but are still lots of years and several hundred million dollars of funding away from from anything resembling an Americanized version.

  
  That's roughly correct, as far as I understand it.  The restrictions come more in the form of things you can't ask the Russians during technical meetings. It's pretty hard to build a rocket engine if all you have to go on are the drawings.
  
  ITAR is a two-way street - it controls imports as well as exports.  For example, a few years back, the government prevented the import of certain Russian firearms and ammunition (by a private business) on the grounds that it was detrimental to public safety. I think the reasoning in the case of big-ticket military technologies is, more or less, that the gov't doesn't want foreign companies getting fat off the American market and then going off and building missiles for North Korea.  Why can they sell us the engines but not the production technology? I do not know.
  
  Even if you interpret ITAR as only being an export restriction, this also creates difficulties in a technical discussion.  Hypothetical: Suppose your company buys pintle housing liners (or whatever) made of steel, but the Russians say that for their engine, the pintle housing liners must be made from unobtainium, which costs 100 times as much and can only be purchased from a single mine in the People's Republic of Whackistan, which you will never, ever get an ITAR license to do business with.  You would like to jointly investigate with the Russians whether steel is good enough for their engine, but if you persuade them that it is, you have just exported a missile technology under ITAR and you now have a couple of years in federal prison to decide on another career. Your alternative is to go with steel, not talk about it to the Russians, and hope the engine still works. Put enough of these scenarios together and pretty soon you might as well just go design your own engine.
• #334 by lmike on 12 Nov, 2006 03:36
• The RD-180 technology* does seem to fall under the export laws.  Perhaps it's considered a US tech*, so a license to manufacture it abroad is needed?  See here: https://www.pmdtc.org/_docs/congnotices/108/CN086-04.pdf  , this letter explicitly grants (my reading) the license to manufacture the RD-180 in both Russia *and* the US for the USAF EELV program.  This is from https://www.pmdtc.org/congnotify_108.htm , which interestingly also contains the US gov sensitive exports grants for such things as *export* of Proton/Zenit SLV launches to Russia, Norway, Ukraine and Kazahstan (due to the commercial US payloads presumably).   The legaleese is a fascinating language, innit?  Anyway, the US government seems to be perfectly fine with the arrangement, so unless someone changes their mind LM will keep on cutting costs (understandably) by keeping the engine production abroad.  *[note] actually, technically speaking, it was developed on LM's penny at Energomash, and under LM's supervision, except that it's a derivative of an existing flown 4 chamber engine and so saved a lot on development.
• #335 by Dexter on 12 Nov, 2006 04:45

• Quote

  Gov't Seagull - 11/11/2006 7:24 PM
  
  
  Efforts to produce the RD-180 in the U.S. have been accelerated a little over the past couple of years. Whether the Russians behave or not, we still can't get technical support, because of ITAR. They can sell the engines to Lockheed, but they can't tell PWR how to build them, if that makes any sense. Likewise, ITAR prevents PWR from completely reverse-engineering the engines. If it wasn't for ITAR, I'd say let's reverse engineer the damn thing and tell the Russians it's payback for the B-29.
  
  I predict about one in five Boeing employees will move from Huntington Beach to Denver.

   

  What does not make sense to me is that the Russians granted approval to export the technology in Sept. 1997.

  http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-5556764_ITM

  http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2006/RAND_MG503.pdf

  Page 63 of the pdf file.

  "Current and past space policy have prohibited dependence of a foreign made major crticial component".

  This would seem like plenty of time to get the co-production going. 

  If Boeing has to amortize development costs of the RS-68 plus the cost of higher American wages to build each one and Lockheed gets cheaper Russian made engines  with no development cost for the US co-production, on paper the Atlas V should be cheaper.

   Perhaps, this is what is holding up the ULA approval as it has been rumored that the companies need to understand the 50-50 contribution to ULA. 

  Rand says the co-production cost is between $500-800M.  I would guess RS-68 development is at least 50% more.  Does anyone have a better number?

   

• #336 by lmike on 12 Nov, 2006 08:56
• I think it's fair to say the ability to manufacture the RDs in the US exists and has existed for some time, but the *will* driven down by the customer -- the government, and the USAF is not there though. Or there far enough. The RD-180 *is* an LM sponsored newly developed engine specifically for the Atlas V.  (Energomash didn't have it in their stock but actually developed it as a new engine for LM as a sub-contractor)  If the US had said "build the engines in Texas, or else... we can the Atlas, and launch everything on (also partly) all American Deltas", you can bet the folks would scramble and do the right thing.
• #337 by Dexter on 12 Nov, 2006 15:46
• I think its fair to say that before any national security payload is launched on an Americanized RD-180, there would have to be a lot of effort to prove and validate that capability.  Saying you have something and doing it are two extremely different things.
  
  Throughout this thread, we have heard that the Atlas V is a better system, that it is less expensive (in part because of the less expensive Russian made engines) so why does Lockheed want to join in ULA.  They suspended a lawsuit that was pending against Boeing for the industrial espionage.
  
  Maybe they are not so confident that the downselect would be Atlas.  Maybe the Russian engine, along with the Swiss fairing among other things is in violation of ....  "Current and past space policy have prohibited dependence of a foreign made major crticial component".
  
  If  I had the better product I would not be afraid of the competition.
• #338 by bombay on 13 Nov, 2006 00:21
• That's where the $800M comes into play.  The RD-180 is unique in many respects upto and including what materials were used to build the RD-180.  It's a known fact that the Russian metallurgical system is completely different than what the Americans and Europeans follow.  Understanding a blue print as far as how something is put together is one thing, but translating a foreign and basically stand alone metallurgical system to determine a comparable metal to use to build the hardware presents a whole new challenge.  This would I think require virtually every component of the new system to be thoroughly tested at a very high cost versus just a relatively small collection of critical components.
  
  So who will fund this?  Is or will the U.S. gov't fund it under the guise of ULA?  It sure wouldn't seem fair to Boeing who fully funded the RS-68.  Why should Lockheed get off the hook for engine development costs?  If this is in the plan, then Boeing should be reimbursed through the Buy 3 award for their development costs.  If this were to happen, then what does come of the 50-50 joint venture if the payback by the gov't to Boeing is amortized into Buy 3 Delta IV launches?  
  
  It should relatively obvious to all that this whole ULA proposal is a complete mess and may get even messier moving forward.
• #339 by yinzer on 13 Nov, 2006 16:26
• Quote

  bombay - 12/11/2006  5:04 PM
  So who will fund this?  Is or will the U.S. gov't fund it under the guise of ULA?  It sure wouldn't seem fair to Boeing who fully funded the RS-68.  Why should Lockheed get off the hook for engine development costs?  If this is in the plan, then Boeing should be reimbursed through the Buy 3 award for their development costs.  If this were to happen, then what does come of the 50-50 joint venture if the payback by the gov't to Boeing is amortized into Buy 3 Delta IV launches?  

  
  Well, Lockheed was pursuing a claim against Boeing for Boeing's industrial espionage, which they were clearly going to win, and win big.  This claim is being dropped with the formation of the ULA, and it could be that getting more money to Americanize the RD-180 is what they want in return.  Sucks for the taxpayer, but Boeing doesn't really have any grounds for complaint.