With the end of the Cold War in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world saw the rise of a global economy where national borders and economic boundaries seemed to become increasingly irrelevant.

One example of this was in the aerospace sector, where the previously unthinkable became commonplace as major American companies not only started using Russian rockets to launch payloads, but purchased rocket engines and even complete booster stages from Russia and former Soviet republics.

The two biggest customers were United Launch Alliance (ULA), which bought RD-180 rocket engines from Russia's NPO Energomash to power its Atlas III and V launch vehicles, and Northrop Grumman, which bought the first stage of its Antares 200 launch vehicle (powered by NPO Energomash RD-181 engines) from Ukraine's Yuzhnoye SDO and Yuzhmash.