On Tuesday, the unmanned Antares rocket exploded seconds after launching:
Ioffe highlights Russia’s reaction:
Russia Today reported that the Antares rocket was “American-Ukrainian,” and other outlets ran with it. The spectacular failure, wroteone Russian tabloid, “is the work of Ukrainian and American specialists.” The rocket, based loosely on the Soviet Zenit rocket, was designed by the originally Soviet, now Ukrainian, Yuzhnoe Design Bureau, according to various Russian news sites. … It would be perfect—if only the Russians were right about the Antares’ origins. But it turns out that the rocket’s engine, like the engines of other privately-made American rockets, was made in … Russia.
Justin Bachman provides more background on the rocket design:
The Soviet-era AJ-26 engine was designed in the 1960s as part of Russia’s space race with the U.S., originally envisioned as a way to propel cosmonauts to the moon. The engines are “refurbished and Americanized,” Frank Culbertson, the Orbital Sciences executive in charge of the NASA program, said Tuesday night in a news conference, defending the AJ-26 as “very robust and rugged” and with a successful track record.
At least one person in the industry disagrees.
Elon Musk, the founder of rival launch company SpaceX, ridiculed the Antares AJ-26 engine in an interview with Wiredmagazine two years ago. Musk said most commercial space companies seek “to optimize their ass-covering” by avoiding risk and employing antiquated but proven technologies. SpaceX builds an “octaweb” of nine of its own Merlin engines for its Falcon 9 rocket. Here is Musk’s riff on the AJ-26:
“One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s—I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.”
Fox News interviewed professor John Logsdon of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. His take on the rocket:
“When Orbital Sciences decided to develop what turned out to be the Antares rocket almost ten years ago, it examined the supply of rocket engines from around the world and decided that the former NK-33 engines, which another U.S. company had already purchased from Russia, gave the best mix of cost and performance,” he explained, in an email. “One can criticize that choice in retrospect, but it was a commercial decision, not symptomatic of anything except the U.S. not investing for many years in new propulsion capabilities.”
Michael Lemonick expects “things will get dicier in 2017 … when two private companies, SpaceX and Boeing, begin carrying astronauts to the I.S.S.”:
[S]pace capsules and shuttles have never been more than experimental. There were fifteen Apollo missions, and the Space Shuttles flew just a hundred and thirty-five times—far too few to work out all the kinks. In this way, the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts on the ground in 1967, and the Challenger and Columbia disasters in 1986 and 2003, were, in a sense, inevitable. Problems were going to arise—the tragedy was one of timing, not of chance.
Similarly, no matter how carefully they focus on safety, Boeing and SpaceX will be operating experimental spacecraft. So will Virgin Galactic, if and when it begins flying tourists into space. Failures won’t necessarily happen at a greater rate than they have on government spacecraft; private space companies have at least as much incentive as NASA to keep mishaps at a minimum, but given the scope of vision of some of what’s been proposed, both by NASA and by private companies, there may be a point where great risk becomes impossible to avoid.
The Dish 