Rocketdyne’s Skies May Get Crowded : Aerospace: Rockwell unit may face competition as Aerojet agrees to market high-performance Russian rocket engines for satellite launches.

At a time when Rocketdyne is stinging from cutbacks in NASA’s budget, a rival aerospace firm has set up a joint venture with a Russian company that could threaten Rocketdyne’s lucrative business making rocket engines for commercial and military satellite launches.

The potential challenge comes from Aerojet of Sacramento, which last month said it had signed a pact with Samara State Scientific and Production Enterprise to refurbish and market 102 rocket engines that were produced by the former Soviet government.

Those engines, called NK-33, were initially designed in the late 1950s for the Soviet N1 Moon rocket project. Most of them are fully built and are now stored in a warehouse in Russia. Aerojet hopes to market them as a lower-cost military and commercial satellite launch vehicle for the U.S. Atlas and Delta rockets, which have long been powered largely by Rocketdyne’s first-stage engines. Rocketdyne’s Atlas and Delta motors, sometimes called booster engines, are what initially propel the satellite rockets into space.

Like Rocketdyne’s engines, the NK-33 is propelled by liquid oxygen and kerosene. But the Russian engine runs at higher pressures and temperatures, making it more efficient and powerful than comparable U.S. engines, including Rocketdyne’s. But the NK-33 has yet to be test fired in the United States, and Aerojet still needs to line up funding from NASA or other sources to help it get the NK-33 ready to meet U.S. standards.

Jack Lee, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., got a good look at the NK-33 at a recent display of the engine. Based on what he saw, Lee said the NK-33 could be a cheaper alternative because the engines have already been built and need only to be modified, presumably at a fraction of the cost of building an engine from scratch. “I would say there probably would be some concern at Rocketdyne,” Lee said.

Price is a big factor, experts say, because NASA and others have been studying ways to lower the cost of commercial and military satellite launches, which are more expensive in the United States than Europe or Asia.

At stake are contracts worth tens of millions of dollars a year. Rocketdyne, the Canoga Park unit of Seal Beach-based Rockwell International, currently gets $5 million for each Delta engine it builds, and almost $10 million for an Atlas engine. Last year there were seven Delta and five Atlas launches. Rocketdyne’s work on the Delta and Atlas engines probably accounts for 10% of its overall business, which approaches $1 billion a year.

At present Rocketdyne faces no competition for those types of engines.

Bill Sprow, Aerojet’s program manager for the NK-33, said the Russian engines are technically superior to Rocketdyne’s because the NK-33 uses a so-called closed cycle that pumps all the fuel into the main engine chamber, rather than jettisoning some to prevent overheating, as Rocketdyne’s engines do.

Sprow hopes to get the NK-33 engines to market by late 1995. Aerojet, a subsidiary of Ohio-based GenCorp, currently makes the first- and second-stage rocket engines that power the Titan satellite rockets, which are launched by Martin Marietta. Aerojet also builds the second-stage engine for the Delta rocket.

But Peter McCourt, Rocketdyne’s vice president of business development, questioned whether the NK-33 could make it to the U.S. market. “So far as we know, the NK-33 has never flown successfully,” he said. “They had four launches of the N1 Moon rocket, and all four were failures. There’s absolutely zero flight-reliability data.”

Aerojet confirmed that the four NK-1 rocket launches did fail. But Aerojet said that was not due to a flaw in the first-stage NK-33 engine, which Aerojet claimed performed successfully, but was due to a flaw in another engine.

By contrast, McCourt said, Rocketdyne-powered Atlas and Delta rockets have flown for 20 years with near-flawless performance. But last March a Rocketdyne Atlas rocket malfunctioned due to a loose screw inside the engine, resulting in a $137-million satellite failing to reach its correct orbit.

Sprow conceded that the NK-33 was far from ready for delivery. Besides test-firings, he said changes must be made in Russian instrumentation as well as mechanical and electrical connections. Sprow added that the joint venture hoped to get a commitment from a potential buyer before investing heavily in the NK-33.

McDonnell Douglas Aerospace in Huntington Beach, which launches the Delta rockets, said it has been briefed on the NK-33. But spokeswoman Anne McCauley said only, “We are following Aerojet’s activities with the Russians.”

General Dynamics Space Systems Division in San Diego, which last month announced it was being sold to Martin Marietta for $208.5 million, is the general contractor of the Atlas launch vehicle. Officials at General Dynamics would not comment on the Russian engine.

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Rocketdyne’s current contract with General Dynamics calls for delivery of 62 Atlas engines for a total of $600 million. In February, Rocketdyne signed a six-year $200-million deal with McDonnell Douglas to build 40 Delta engines.

Rocketdyne cannot afford to lose those two contracts, because two-thirds of its revenue comes from NASA for work on the space shuttle’s main engine and the electrical power system for the proposed space station--both of which are facing budget cuts.

Last fall Congress sharply curtailed the space station budget, and future funding for U.S. contractors is uncertain because that program is expected to be undertaken jointly with the Russians. And NASA has said it wants to lower its cost for space shuttle launches. To prepare for leaner times, Rocketdyne said in November that it would trim up to 990 workers, or 15% of its 6,600 employees. Currently, between 500 and 700 Rocketdyne employees work on the Atlas and Delta engines.

Like Rocketdyne, Aerojet has had its share of troubles because of NASA’s belt-tightening. Aerojet now produces the orbital propulsion system on the space shuttle, and it had been working for three years on developing an advanced solid rocket motor for the space shuttle. But NASA scrapped that program last fall, resulting in layoffs of about 500 Aerojet workers.

Still, some of the NK-33’s specifications are unmatched by comparable U.S. engines, said Walter Williams, a retired NASA chief engineer and now an aerospace consultant in Tarzana.

The NK-33, for example, has greater thrust, or the force by which a rocket is driven, than Rocketdyne’s engines. And as a result, experts say, the NK-33 can carry heavier payloads.

But Williams said performance was just one issue.

“What will it cost to get the NK-33 ready for use for U.S. launch vehicles?” he asked. “What is its safety record? What will the Russians want for the engines?”