Private equity deal shows just how far America’s legacy rocket industry has fallen
摘要
美国传统火箭企业Rocketdyne曾主导大型液体火箭发动机市场，为土星五号、航天飞机等关键项目提供动力。冷战结束后，其行业地位逐渐衰落。自上世纪90年代被波音收购后，该公司仅全新研发了RS-68一款大型发动机，并于2024年退役。私募股权交易折射出美国传统火箭产业的变迁。
If you are a student of space history or tracked the space industry before billionaires and venture capital changed it forever, you probably know the name Rocketdyne.
A half-century ago, Rocketdyne manufactured almost all of the large liquid-fueled rocket engines in the United States. The Saturn V rocket that boosted astronauts toward the Moon relied on powerful engines developed by Rocketdyne, as did the Space Shuttle, the Atlas, Thor, and Delta rockets, and the US military's earliest ballistic missiles.
Rocketdyne's dominance began to erode after the end of the Cold War. The company started in 1955 as a division of North American Aviation, then became part of Rockwell International until Boeing acquired Rockwell's aerospace division in 1996. Rocketdyne continually designed and tested large new rocket engines from the 1950s through the 1980s. Since then, Rocketdyne has developed and qualified just one large engine design from scratch—the RS-68—and it retired from service in 2024.
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