Russian-made RD-180s are used as the first stage engines in the otherwise U.S.-made Atlas-V, one of the two rockets used by the U.S. government to launch nearly every uncrewed spacecraft (the other rocket is the Delta IV).

The Atlas is made by a company called the United Launch Alliance (ULA), which is a joint venture between Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, and, at the moment, the sole provider of rockets for national security needs. The ULA also launches the majority of uncrewed NASA missions (resupplying the space station is a notable exception). The Atlas-Vs are very reliable but also very expensive. For example, NASA is paying about $160 million for an Atlas-V to launch its next mission to Mars, InSight, for which the spacecraft and two years of operations have a total budget of about $450 million.

Regardless, the Atlas uses the RD-180 and now Rogozin says that Russia will stop exporting them to the U.S. unless the ULA guarantees that they won't be used in national security launches. This is very unlikely. So what happens now?

Again, the immediate impact is mitigated because the ULA has 16 RD-180 engines already in the United States, and they claim that this gives them up to two years' worth of buffer for things to simmer down between the U.S. and Russia. As of this post, the ULA has not received any additional confirmation that this threat has come to pass (they have four engines currently on-order for delivery this year), though at this point I don't see how Russia could not follow through, at least for a while.

If Russia stops the shipments, the Delta IV can be used as an alternate rocket. This isn't ideal though, as the Delta IV is significantly more powerful than the Atlas-V, and significantly more expensive—around $350 million per launch. It's also not clear how quickly the ULA could ramp up production of this rocket, either.

It's also looking likely that the Department of Defense will begin to develop their own RD-180 replacement. But that will take at least a few years and cost on the order of $1 billion.

And then, for what I assume many of you are wondering, there's SpaceX and their Falcon 9 rocket. This whole issue falls between an pretty major power struggle for the future of the U.S. government launch market, with SpaceX trying to compete with ULA for national security launches. I'm not going to delve too much into this, save for the fact that there has been litigation by SpaceX against the Air Force, protests against big "block buy" contracts given to the ULA, and lots of accusations exchanged between both companies about risk and cost and value to the taxpayer.

SpaceX has been warning Congress about Atlas-V's Russian engine dependence for some time now, and this recent move by Rogozin pretty much plays directly into their narrative. The problem is that SpaceX is not yet certified by the Air Force to carry military payloads (they're working on it) and it's unclear if the Falcon 9 can launch NASA missions, like InSight, to Mars (which is a significantly different requirement than launching something into low-Earth orbit).

For the Society's interests, we're particularly worried about how this situation is going to impact the flights of two planetary exploration missions in 2016: OSIRIS-REx and InSight. Both missions are planned to launch on Atlas-Vs. My gut tells me that if it comes down to military necessity vs. Mars exploration, the military will get those Atlas-Vs over NASA.

Why This Is Happening

In a word: Crimea.

But in a lot more words: this is another step in an escalating series of reactive policy decisions between the U.S. and Russia caused by Russian interference in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea.

In early April, the U.S. broke most ties between NASA and their counterparts in Roscosmos, though the International Space Station was specifically exempted in this directive. While this was widely (mis)reported as coming from NASA, this seems to have been an Administration-wide policy that applied to all federal agencies and their Russian counterparts.

The Obama Administration has also been levelling targeted sanctions against high-ranking individuals within the Kremlin, of which (surprise!) Dmitry Rogozin was one.

So this seems to be a retaliatory move in response to these and other sanctions. Note that so far this is mainly rhetoric. None of this is immediate. I hope that the inter-dependency between Russia and the U.S. on human spaceflight acts as a stopgap, or at least a road bump, to allow time for tensions to simmer down and for real progress to be made.

So don't start freaking out just yet. Should you be concerned? Yes. But a lot has yet to happen before we see real impacts from Rogozin's statements.