THE ENGINE THAT CAME IN FROM THE COLD

摘要

In the two decades since, 83 more such rockets have taken off from Florida.On the Atlas 3 and its successor, the Atlas 5, the RD-180 carried at least 16 American spy satellites to orbit, along with 13 military communications satellites, a half-dozen GPS satellites, two military weather satellites, and three missile warning satellites, designed to detect rocket launches from, among other countries, the one where it was built. It launched four American Mars missions. NASA's launch of New Horizons to Pluto in 2006 and Juno to Jupiter in 2011 were both made on the back of the RD-180.The RD-180 is remarkable not only for die geopolitical peculiarities of its rise to prominence, but because it was in many ways simply better than any other rocket engine of its time. When, in February 2019, Elon Musk announced a successful test of SpaceX's Raptor engine, which is intended to power the company's next-generation rocket Starship,he bragged of the high pressures reached in the Raptor's thrust chamber: over 265 times atmospheric pressure at sea level. Raptor, he said on Twitter, had exceeded the record held for several decades by the "awesome Russian RD-180."