By Scott Bennett

The US government’s recent order of Russian rocket engines shows that America has become inferior to Russia in space technology, says an American analyst and former US Army officer.

United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, said Wednesday it had ordered 20 new RD-180 rocket engines from Russia on top of 29 engines it ordered last year.

The Russian engines will be used to lift off the Atlas 5 rockets until a new American-made engine is developed and certified, the ULA said.

The new order came after Congress enacted a massive spending bill that eased a ban on using Russian engines to launch US military and intelligence satellites for the 2016 fiscal year.

In an interview with Press TV on Friday, counter-terrorism analyst Scott Bennett described the deal as “comical” and a sign of lacking American technology.

“[The deal] is really comical if it was not so sad and so illustrative of the real fall of the American technological sector and education, as well as the American society,” he said.

In the 1980s, during former president Ronald Reagan’s administration, the US trounced the Soviet Union in space technology, a superiority that Americans celebrated as a “major victory,” the analyst said.

However, he noted, what Reagan started was never advanced by his successors. “Sad to say, none of them have ever been able to hold a light to Ronald Reagan, because over the past 30 years the US has slowly deteriorated and degenerated educationally, leaving the basic foundation of its space engineering mathematical programs, where the Russians have not. ”

“We see that Russia now is in the position that the US was in 1980s,” Bennett said. “Russia has superior technology.”

According to Bennett, who is also a former US Army psychological warfare officer, Moscow is now far ahead of Washington in terms of satellite and aircraft engine technology.

“This is widely known by those in the military sectors that has been evidenced by certain drones flying over the US naval vessels, shattering their capability,” Bennett claimed.

The analyst noted that Russia has every right to sanction the US and refuse selling its space technology to Washington, which serves as a counter-measure to the Western sanctions imposed against Moscow last year.

The US and the European Union have imposed several sets of economic sanctions against Russia over the conflict in east Ukraine since the early 2014. Moscow denies any involvement, saying the sanctions will not change its stance on its western neighbor.

The news came on the heels of a recent decision by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to end its reliance on Russian technology for manned missions to the International Space Station.

Read more: http://presstv.com/Detail/2015/12/25/443177/Russia-US-Space-Tech-Bennett/