Doug Mohney over at Satellite Spotlight has noticed how much hardware that we rely on needs Russian engines.
One thought on “Our Space Program, Made In Russia”
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Doug Mohney over at Satellite Spotlight has noticed how much hardware that we rely on needs Russian engines.
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Well, I’ve always thought our rocket engine production costs were insane, perhaps a relic of their historical development as nuclear warhead launchers. How can something that weighs as much as a car and has vastly, vastly fewer parts cost tens of millions of dollars per each in quantity? I think that’s where private start-ups like SpaceX will make the biggest dent.
We’ve seen Soviet cars, Soviet tanks, Soviet jet engines, and Soviet appliances, and we’d be crazy to buy them. I don’t think it’s that the Russians are somehow magically better at building rocket engines than other things. I think it’s that our own historical engine production must’ve been more closed-shop, bureaucratic, and inefficient than theirs.