According to the military press, “Pentagon and Air Force officials Friday warned lawmakers that a congressional push to limit the use of a Russian-made rocket engine, and the development of a U.S.-made alternative, is likely to extend beyond the 2019 deadline. It might eventually push the United Launch Alliance out of national security space missions altogether.”

The Commander of Air Force Space Command, General John Hyten, told the House Armed Services Committee that the Senate Armed Services Committee's push to stop all use of the Russian-made RD-180 engines, was "aggressive." The replacement contenders are for the new engines so as to punish Russia are as follows: United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Orbital ATK, Aerojet Rocketdyne and venture funded Blue Origin. It is not surprising that they spoke before the committee boasted that they could get their rockets ready by the 2019 deadline. None of them included the time for certification and the launch systems that would have to be adjusted, which realistically would add two to three to their prediction or 2021 or 2022. "It's possible to get there in 2019," Hyten said. "The skepticism … is there are significant technical challenges in a couple areas."
Lt. Gen. Samuel Graves, commander of the Air Force Space and Missile Center is on the record stating that “there would be modifications to launch vehicle structures, fuel systems, heat shields, thrust vector control and throttling, all adding time to an already tight deadline. Every rocket is heavily influenced by the design of its engine," Greaves said. "To do otherwise produces outcomes that are suboptimal in terms of performance, safety, cost and development timelines. You cannot simply drop in a replacement rocket engine without extensively re-engineering the entire launch system." The risk are very high that the reason of removing the RD-180 for political reasons could result in years of delay on security payloads not getting into orbit or as in the case of the Falcon 9/dragon explosions on the pad or on launch sequence. "We must ensure, from cradle to grave, in the national security community that we can get everything we need," Michael Griffin of the RD-180 ARM study said.

On must remember that the “GOP hawk” Armed Services Committee chairman Senator John McCain, Republican of the State of Arizona, must act viral so as to completely stop the use of the RD-180, and to ignore that some RD-180 launch vehicles must act as backups incase the list of contenders fails on launch. As a point, “The Senate Armed Services Committee's version of the fiscal 2016 National Defense Authorization Act limits the Pentagon's amount of Russian RD-180 rocket engines to nine, and calls on multiple U.S. companies to produce rockets and launch systems by 2019. The Air Force wants to be able to buy 14 more of the engines to be able to cover launches until 2022.”

For political reasons and venture capitalist who funded Elon Musk, the effort to sanction the RD-180 as a Soviet symbol, “would effectively shift the monopoly from ULA, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, to SpaceX,” General John Hyten said. Tory Bruno, the president and chief executive officer of ULA said to the committee, "If current law is not modified, America will no longer be compliant with its assured access to space policy as competition will have been unintentionally eliminated. Our efforts to field a new launch system with an American-made engine hinge on our ability to close a business case justifying the significant corporate investment we will have to make to field this system." After the explosion of the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s position is that the Falcon Heavy, which is un-certified with carry all US spy satellite payloads. Is this wishful politically correct thinking? We will have to wait and cross our fingers.