The House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee will recommend additional funding in the defense authorization bill for a replacement to Russia’s RD-180 rocket engine, a staffer said April 22 during a background briefing with reporters.
In years past, the United States has relied on buying the RD-180 from Russia for the first stage of the Atlas V launch vehicle. However, the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act mandated that the military find a replacement to the Russian engine by 2019.
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James has told Congress that timetable may not be feasible.
Subcommittee chairman Mike Rogers, (R-Ala.) is concerned that the Air Force is not making enough progress toward the 2019 deadline, the staffer said.
“I think you’ll see that he’s directing the Air Force to take a look at what was set in FY 15 and he’s … going to recommend additional resources to ensure that we are able to end reliance on the RD-180 in 2019,” he said.
The subcommittee’s NDAA proposal withholds all money for the Air Force’s next-generation weather satellite system out of concerns that not all of the appropriate requirements are being satisfied by the current program of record, the staffer said.
Funding will not be appropriated to the program until the Defense Secretary briefs congressional defense committees on a plan to address cloud characterization and theater weather imagery requirements. The Joint Chiefs of Staff must also sign off on those requirements and certify that the plan has no negative effect on combatant commanders, the proposal said.
The subcommittee also recommends creating a Multiple Object Kill Vehicle (MOKV) program for the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. The director of the Missile Defense Agency is charged with establishing a program of record for the MOKV, which should conduct test flights no later than 2020, the mark said.
The subcommittee will mark up its proposal on April 23, with a full committee markup planned for April 29.