Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz), center, said in January he intended to introduce legislation that would reinstate the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016's RD-180 engine ban.

The Senate Armed Services Committee marked up its version of a defense authorization bill with language that lowers the limit on RD-180 engines to 9, instead of the 18 in the House bill.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...