Antares used a ukrainian-built first stage and a russian-produced engine.
So, when the Ukranian factory got blown up by the russians, that kinda put Antares in a bind.
They're gonna give a go at a new first stage, but for now, this is the last Antares.
In a way, this Antares launch is the end to a period of in spaceflight that began in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
With the USSR gone, the former Soviet aerospace industry was a wreck, to say the absolute least of it, as all the former state-owned Design Bureaus found themselves scattered across several states, not to mention extremely short on funding.
In short, this scared the US State Department, because Oh No! All the talented folks who know how to build rocket might get poached by [INSERT CONTEMPORARY US ADVERSARY HERE] to build nuclear missiles for them! We Cannot Allow This!
The scattered aerospace industry being broke ALSO meant they were cheap to work with, in a lot of cases, so these two factors combined would bring about a whole new era of international collaboration in spaceflight.
It was the era that brought us Shuttle flights to the Mir space station. It gave us the International Space Station, as NASA ripped out half of Space Station Freedom to fuse with the Russian Mir-2
It gave us SeaLaunch, where Boeing partnered with two former Soviet Design Bureaus to launch the Zenit rocket from an offshore platform. Remember Zenit, it'll become relevant again later.
And, relevant to the matter at hand, it gave us several great instances of Russian engines on American rockets.
This one's a long one, i had to draft it twice because it was too long the first time, and I wasn't gonna do that a third time so here we go. Beware. There's history below the cut.
It might be inflammatory to say the Russians were better at rocket engines than we were, but it's at least accurate to say they cracked a few nuts we never did, to the point where when folks from the assorted design bureaus started trying to get American attention, a lot of American aerospace engineers straight up didn't believe they were being truthful with how performant their rocket engines were until we got one on a test stand.
Once we did, though, it didn't take long for American companies to start buying 'em. Lockheed would strike first, ordering a new engine from NPO Energomash (the former OKB-456), the RD-180, for use first on their Atlas III rocket, then Atlas V (still flying today, though not for much longer).
In order to understand the RD-180, we have to go back to Zenit. Zenit is a launch vehicle adapted from the side boosters for the Energia rocket, which launched the Soviet Buran shuttle, and it was powered by an RD-170 rocket engine. The RD-170 is a 4-chambered, staged-combustion engine, and it was absolutely killer.
- Staged Combustion is a form of engine cycle; the least worst metaphor would be "carbureted vs mechanical fuel injection vs electronic fuel injection" or "naturally aspirated vs turbocharged vs supercharged" in terms of automotive/etc engines. It's just a different way the stuff is delivered to the burn place.
- 4-chambered means that the engine has 4 combustion chambers+nozzles, but only a single "powerhead," the assembly of plumbing, pumps, wiring, etc that make the engine work. Most rocket engines you're famliliar with only have one combustion chamber, one nozzle, per powerhead.
With that primer, the RD-180 on the Atlas III and V was essentially half of an RD-170, they removed two of the nozzles and downscaled the powerhead to match. On the Atlas III, it would replace the Booster-Sustainer engines dating back to the original SM-65 Atlas missile from the 1960s, america's first ICBM. In so many ways, Atlas III is the most wack we ever got, from the paper-thin stainless-steel "balloon tanks" that formed its structure, to the fact that we were putting a post-soviet engine underneath something originally designed to throw nuclear warheads at them. I love Atlas III.
Atlas V would do away with the last vestiges of the original Atlas missile, keeping the RD-180, but replacing the first stage with something that could support its own weight without needing to be constantly pressurized. It's still flying to this day, but its days are numbered for reasons we'll get into later.
There wouldn't be a whole lot of other activity in the "American Rockets with Russian Engines" department for a bit, but that'd change around the end of the 2000s, when NASA announced and awarded the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract to develop systems to resupply the Space Station as Shuttle wound down, the very same that gave SpaceX their big break to develop Falcon 9 and Dragon.
Also awarded development money under COTS were Rocketplane Kistler (story for someone else to tell), and Orbital Sciences, who had developed the first successful private/commercial launch vehicle back in the 90s with the plane-launched Pegasus, and seen assorted succcess with their Taurus and Minotaur rockets, which used decommissioned stages from Peacekeeper and Minuteman missiles with additional stages added on to make them capable satellite launchers.
okay we're finally to Antares
There's a policy put in place by industry lobbyists back in the day that prevents any firm making use of retired missile motors in a rocket from selling launches on said rocket to anyone but the US Government, so when Orbital got the NASA contract, they decided they'd put some of it towards developing a launch vehicle that wouldn't fall under this restriction.
This brought about some problems. Orbital Sciences at this point was primarily an integrator, they didn't have their own tooling to manufacture rocket stages, so they'd have to contract it out to someone. And that's where the post-Soviet aerospace industry comes in, once more.
- The former Yuzhnoye Design Bureau (now trading under the name KB Pivdenne), operating in what had become Ukraine, would provide the first stage tankage, adapted from the tanks for the Zenit rocket (there's Zenit again!).
- The first stage engines would be NK-33s, Soviet era rocket engines that had literally sit in a warehouse since the Soviet lunar program and its N1 rocket had been scutttled, stored away in defiance of orders to scrap them and everything related to the N1 after its cancellation. These were sold to Aerojet Rocketdyne and branded as AJ-26s under their catalog.
Orbital Sciences would integrate the first stage themselves, assembling two NK-33s beneath the tanks provided by Yuzhnoye, and adding a solid motor second stage on top, common with their Minotaur and Taurus, but not a missile stage. This rocket would become known as Antares, and it would launch the Cygnus resupply craft to the ISS, itself a kitbash of an existing Orbital Sciences-developed satellite bus with a cargo module produced by Thales Alenia Space, who produced most of the ISS modules.
The first four flights of Antares were perfect, launching two test flights and two full-on Cygnus missions to Station, and everything seemed like it was pretty hunky-dory, all things considered.
In 2014, the third resupply mission to the ISS exploded shortly after liftoff, as the 40-year-old refurbished N1 moon rocket engines yee'd their last haw, failing spectacularly.
But as you can gather from the fact an Antares just flew, that wasn't the end. Our friend the RD-170 comes back again, this time in the form of the RD-181 engine, which took the RD-170 from Zenit, and quartered it. There would be only a single combustion chamber and nozzle, and the powerhead would be scaled down even more. These would directly replace the NK-33s, and they're what Antares would fly with from that point onward.
the beginning of the end
So, in addition to the Antares launch failure... something else happened in 2014. Russia decided Crimea was theirs now, regardless of what Ukraine and the rest of the world thought about it.
In response, a lot of countries enacted sanctions, and in America one of these sanctions took the form of a ban on the import and use of Russian rocket engines, a ban that gradually got descoped to "but only for defense payloads" "but there's a gradual sunsetting period so we can hoard a bunch of them please???" with a bit of lobbying.
The reason I consider tonight the end of that era, while Atlas is still flying, is because Atlas flies defense payloads, it was subject to the 2014 ban and so its days were numbered already. The backstock they were allowed to accrue after a bit of lobbying was just delaying the inevitable.
Antares was not subject to these sanctions, as a civil rocket that didn't compete for defense contracts (Orbital had Minotaur for that). So, when Russia started their war on Ukraine outright, bombing the former Yuzhnoye and ensuring an absolute, hard-and-fast, no-caveats ban on importing Russian engines altogether, that was it. That was the end.
Antares will (probably) live on. In the intervening years, Orbital Sciences merged with ATK to become Orbital ATK, and then just a few years later they were bought outright by Northrop Grumman. Northrop Grumman has farmed out a replacement first stage to NewSpace startup Firefly, who were at one point also Ukrainian but thats a weird story.
But tonight, as that last Ukranian-built, Russian-engined Antares first stage lit up to carry food and supplies to the Space station, it also carried the last wisps of a bygone era with it, of the 30 years in spaceflight from 1991 to 2022.
Farewell, Antares.
If you read through this and enjoyed it, please consider givin' it a share, I kinda kneecapped it by posting it while half-finished on accident and then pulling it back into drafts. And also by posting that shitpost about "the cisgender of turbosuperchargers" that research for this post spawned.
I've made a few updates to fix some small formatting errors, and to correct the fact that we're in 2020 and not 2010 so the 90s were 30 years ago. Time is a fuck. I'll also be leaving a list of supplementary reading items in the comments, if you're interested in going a little further.
