The Soviet Union lost the space race, but not because they didn’t try. They developed a monster of a rocket, the N-1. Unfortunately, it was so complicated they could never get it to quite work. The engine made for their moon rocket was called the NK-15. The N-1 launcher originally used thirty NK-15 engines for its first stage. After four consecutive launch failures and no successes, the project was cancelled. While other aspects of the vehicle were being modified or redesigned, the Russian company made modifications to the design of the NK-15. The new engines were called the NK-33 and NK-43. The intent was that the new engines would power a second generation moon rocket to be called the N-1F. But since the Moon race had been lost, and the Soviet space program cancelled the project and no N-1F ever reached the launch pad.

When the N-1 moon program was shut down, all the hardware built for the project was ordered destroyed. Instead, a bureaucrat took the engines–worth millions of dollars each–and hid them in a warehouse. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, word of the engines leaked to the United States. About 150 engines survived. Thirty years after they had been built, Russia finally sold thirty-six of them to the American company Aerojet General for $1.1 million each. Aerojet then modified and renamed the NK-33 and NK-43 to the AJ26-58 and the AJ26-59, respectively.

Later, the U.S. company Orbital Sciences Corporation decided to use two modified NK-33s in the first stage of their Antares light-to-medium-lift launcher. Orbital has a contract with NASA to launch the Antares, bearing the Cygnus cargo ship, to the International Space Station. The first Antares rocket was launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on April 21, 2013. It was the first time that NK-33s had been used since the early 1970s. A month later, they lofted the first cargo ship to the International Space Station on September 18, 2013. Aerojet has agreed to recondition sufficient NK-33s to serve Orbital’s eight flight NASA Commercial Resupply Services contract. Beyond that, it has a stockpile of only twenty-three of the modified NK-33s. The Russian company that built the NK-33s stopped building them decades ago, which brings into question the long term viability of Antares–unless they start manufacturing them again.

A descendant of the NK-33 is the RD-180 which is today being manufactured in Russia and is the engine used in the American Atlas V.

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