Since the report was not yet public, Griffin couldn’t share its results, but he did offer his own views on the situation, including his belief that developing a replacement of some kind of the RD-180 is not something that can be done quickly. “Anyone who has ever been out on a test stand, testing their own rocket engine, knows that this is, at best, a five- or six-year process to bring it to fruition,” he said of the development time. “And it really doesn’t matter whether you’re producing, or returning to production, an existing design like the RD-180 or building your own.”
Well, who's idea was it to launch a large amount of national security payload on spacecrafts that require Russian made rockets?That timeframe matches up with other estimates provided by the Defense Department in recent months, which estimated that starting domestic RD-180 production would cost about $1 billion and take five years. With the current stockpile of engines sufficient for only about two years’ worth of Atlas V launches, Griffin said there would be an “enormous food fight” for access to the rocket among the various government programs should imports be cut off, with some programs forced to shift to the Delta IV and perhaps be significantly delayed.