An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Thursday with a classified satellite for the US National Reconnaissance Office.
Five minutes after the 9:09am launch, rocket manufacturer United Launch Alliance (ULA), a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, shut down its live Webcast under a prearranged news blackout ordered by the US military.
While the mission unfolds under a veil of secrecy, the future of the Atlas 5 launcher is getting wide public view. Potential rival Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) filed a lawsuit last month to attempt to end ULA’s exclusive right to sell launch services to the US military.
In its lawsuit, SpaceX also questioned whether the Atlas rocket’s Russian-made RD-180 engine violated economic sanctions that the US imposed to punish Russia for its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. A US federal judge slapped a temporary injunction on the engine sales, but then lifted it a few days later after US Treasury and US Department of State officials said no specific sanctions appeared to have been violated.
The reprieve lasted less than a week. Russia, stung by US export bans, countered with a ban of its own on sales of rocket engines that would be used to launch US military satellites.
So far, the US has received no official word that the engine sales will stop, General William Shelton, who heads the US Air Force Space Command, told reporters at a Space Foundation conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado, this week.
For now, ties between the Russian company that builds the rocket engines and ULA were proceeding as “business as usual,” Shelton said on Tuesday.
A new US Air Force report on the RD-180 issue determined that an export ban would have significant impact on the US military launch program, sources briefed on the report said.
Options to mitigate a loss of the engines are limited through 2017, the report said. It recommended the air force increase funding to develop a replacement engine that would be manufactured domestically.
Shelton, who declined to comment on the report, said developing a new engine likely would cost more than US$1 billion and take five years to complete.
In its lawsuit, filed in the US Federal Court of Claims, SpaceX offered another option — buying its US-made Falcon 9 rockets.
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