NASA and the Private Sector - Page 48

On October 29 2014 20:14 ahswtini wrote:
Well, good thing it was unmanned

The fault was probably caused by using 40 year old soviet AJ-26 rocket engines, one of which recently exploded during testing.

NASA is down to one commercial provider of cargo to the International Space Station until an investigation determines what caused an unmanned Orbital Sciences Corp. rocket to blow up Tuesday evening shortly after lifting off from a Virginia pad.

The Antares rocket's failure leaves SpaceX as the only U.S. company able to fly cargo to the orbiting laboratory for the near future, raising the stakes of SpaceX's next launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., which is planned no earlier than Dec. 9.

A Cygnus spacecraft packed with more than 5,000 pounds of equipment and science experiments was destroyed Tuesday when the 14-story rocket suffered a problem with its first stage and fell back to the ground, generating a massive fireball on impact.

No one was injured. The severity of damage to the Wallops Island launch pad was not immediately known.

NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports that as investigators examine what went wrong with the launch of an unmanned Antares rocket on Tuesday, they'll likely take a hard look at powerful engines originally destined to send cosmonauts to the moon, a project that was scrapped by the USSR more than four decades ago.

Geoff says that although the investigation is just starting, the NK-33 rocket engine is already a focus. It was produced for the N1 moon rocket — the Soviet Union's answer to the U.S. Saturn V. But the N1 became mired in development problems, and the Soviet moon project, hopelessly behind the Americans, was quietly scuttled circa 1974.

Fast-forward to 2010: The NK-33s were refurbished and re-designated by Aerojet Rocketdyne as the AJ26 and sold to Dulles-based Orbital Sciences for use in Antares. Although four previous flights of Antares have gone off without a hitch, one of the engines failed during testing earlier this year, Geoff says.

"They were in fact built in Russia about 40 years ago and stored in plastic bags after their moon program was canceled," Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tells NPR.

"They were in fact built in Russia about 40 years ago and stored in plastic bags after their moon program was canceled," Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tells NPR.

And thats why SpaceX is the best space company, because they are actually trying to design a brand new rocket instead of recycle tired old crap on the cheap.

On November 02 2014 08:58 m4ini wrote:


Apart from the part where that dude is trying to be populistic and spreads bs.

I'm not sure if you have any clue about rocket-motors in general, but that "russian old crap" is more efficient than any(!) US rocket-motor of today (including SLS and Falcon9). In terms of t2w ratio AND specific impuls.

"It's russian, must be shit" is so tiresome to read. SpaceX's "new design for a brand new rocket" is less efficient than 40 year old "russian crap", so i have no idea where your comment comes from. Not to mention that orbital science corp doesn't recycle anything on the cheap, it's Aerojet retrofitting and refurbishing it. You know, the same stuff that was done with the shuttle and it's SRBs.

Now, as you know, i'm the first one to jump on the bandwagon if it is about hating russia (as long as it's justified) - but spouting random misinformation "just because" sucks.

edit: wow, just checked your source, really?

Fyi, the N1 didn't use NK-33 motors, but NK-15s. The NK-33 was intended to be used in an advanced version of the N1(F), which has never even seen a launchpad. Come on.