Right off the bat, you're citing an idiot...
Agreed.
And why would we steal it from the Russians when we were and still are working with them on the ISS?
And? We paid for it. We didn't steal it. How , in any rational world, is this relevent?
During the Cold War we had to resort to some underhanded means of obtaining materials we could only get from Soviet Bloc countries. Most notably, the titanium to build the SR-71 all came from the former Soviet Union. But the notion that it would be smuggled in tiny amounts on passenger liners is thoroughly ridiculous. As I noted, we (meaning mostly the CIA) set up shell companies and semi-legitimate supply chains that were just complicated and murky enough to keep the Soviets from guessing where the titanium was ultimately going. We needed these materials in engineering amounts, not something you can stuff under the seat of an army truck.
We were sharing certain elements of space technology beginning back in the 1970s. That only escalated as time went on. By the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, we were sharing things openly. I know because I was there and got to work freely with Russian colleagues. My Russian is still terrible, but I'm a witness to just how badly wrong Rabe has the details. And as far as materiel, we were buying it from them openly whereas before it was through the aforementioned shell companies.
That's not to say we were on equal footing. When the Soviet Union lost the race to the Moon, they sank everything into space stations. Afterward, we sank everything into the STS, which was less wise in retrospect. So the initial collaboration was NASA trying to learn everything they could about the Russian advances in space-station techniques, the result of which was the first ISS design. W. Von Braun's original plan for further exploration of the Solar System was to build an orbital station to assemble space vehicles in orbit. To build that required a space shuttle, which was considered at the time the lowest cost access to orbit. We only got as far as building STS before Congress decided nothing more was worth funding. That's why Von Braun left NASA. His plan wasn't advanced until the ISS was built.
And? The great thing about 1990s USA was we had cash, and the Russians needed it. So why not buy these things out in the open with all the other things we were buying at the time.
This point specifically addresses metallurgy and I want to flesh this out. Yes, the Russians were ahead of the U.S. in many aspects of metallurgy, some involving exotic rare-earth elements. As you note, they just sold us whatever we asked for. But it's interesting to know where this came from, since it relates to the previous point about the RD-170.
An evolution of the traditional liquid-fueled rocket is the staged-combustion design. To provide mechanical power, a turbine is operated using a mix of propellants that's either fuel-rich or oxidizer-rich in order to keep the temperature down. The exhaust from this is fed back into the powerhead and fleshed out to full stoichiometrics so that the propulsive burn is fully realized. The U.S. prefers fuel-rich designs, so that the turbine exhaust contains unburnt fuel species. The Russians use oxidizer-rich designs, which (for handwavy science reasons) are more efficient.
The design problem is that propellant lines are almost always some ferrous alloy, and very hot oxygen has a tendency to literally
burn iron, not just melt it. This is how oxyacetylene cutting torches work. So we were very interested in the metallurgy in Russian rocket engines. The result of our information sharing is, among other things, the SpaceX Raptor engine, which is the final evolution of staged combustion: full flow. The ongoing danger of the design is illustrated by the NK-33 and the loss of an Antares rocket a few years ago that used them.
Yes, it suggests the people who put together the JAIC are not delusional nutjobs who chase ghost stories.
Conspiracy theorists really do take themselves way too seriously. It's not ominous or derelict that an investigative body didn't consider some wacky scheme or another. These are professional investigators, not wild-eyed conspiratorialists trying to make a name for themselves.
