Russia Succeeds Where US Fails; Russia Successfully Launches Cargo Ship To The ISS

[Purveyor]

Russia Succeeds Where US Fails: ISS NASA Antares Rocket Explosion Meant to Happen; Russia Successfully Launches Cargo Ship

By Esther Tanquintic-Misa | October 30, 2014 1:32 PM EST

The first time Elon Musk heard how Orbital Sciences was assembling the Antares rocket for NASA two years ago, he had hinted its eventual launch will be a total failure, which did happen on Tuesday. But where the United States failed, Russia managed to hurl a successful launch toward the International Space Station a day after the tragedy.

In an interview held two years ago with Wired, Musk, who is CEO of SpaceX, rival to Orbital Sciences, said he found it incredulous its competitor is working on a design that's lifted from engines made over five decades ago. "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," were his exact words in the interview.

The Russian engines Musk referred to are the Aerojet Rocketdyne AJ-26 engines. Originally built by the Moscow-based JSC Kuznetsov in the late 60s and early 70s, they are actually modified and retrofitted Soviet-made NK-33 engines that were designed to launch the N1 Russian rocket on lunar missions. Suffice to say, the engines have been out of service for decades.

Musk is no doomsayer. Being an expert on the field, he just questioned the production decisions of Orbital Sciences, which received NASA's approval. Simply put, it met required standards. But his foresight chillingly became true somehow when the Antares rocket exploded in the skies just six seconds after launch Tuesday night. The exact cause of the explosion is still being investigated by NASA. The rocket was carrying a Cygnus spacecraft that will deliver some 2,293 kg worth of supplies, science experiments and equipment for the International Space Station on a routine mission.

But where the United States glaringly failed, the Russians likewise glaringly succeeded. A day after the unfortunate incident of Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket explosion, Russia successfully launched an unmanned rocket early Wednesday.

more...

http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/571194/20141030/russia-iss-nasa-antares-rocket-cargo-ship.htm#.VFGmZleSUWd

[msanthrope]

1. You Better Believe It! nt

[msanthrope]

2. Go watch the World Series....thisi s a barnburner of a game. nt

[Keefer]

3. The funny thing is,

the rocket engine on that Anteres rocket that exploded yesterday was a Soviet Union-made engine.

Antares rocket explosion: The question of using decades-old Soviet engines

The tale of the engines that propelled the Antares rocket, which exploded in a spectacular ball of flame in Virginia Tuesday night, begins four decades ago, thousands of miles away, in the land of communism and Sputnik. There, in the Soviet Union, rocket scientists conceived and built dozens of rocket engines meant to power Russian astronauts into the cosmos. But it didn’t work out that way.

Instead, all four launches of the mighty N1 Soviet rocket, which used an earlier iteration of the first-stage engines used in Thursday’s launch, failed between 1969 and 1972. And as the Soviet Union abandoned the idea of putting cosmonauts on the moon, those engines languished in Russia “without a purpose,” reported Space Lift Now.

That was until they were snapped up by Dulles-based Orbital Sciences, which built the rocket that exploded. It uses two modified versions of those Russian engines to propel missions to the International Space Station, according to the company’s user’s guide. To be clear, investigators say they do not know what caused Tuesday’s explosion, which destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment. But some observers are questioning those Soviet-era engines.

More here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/10/29/antares-rocket-explosion-the-question-of-using-decades-old-soviet-engines/

[mythology]

5. Well that's awkward

I really don't get why some people are so happy to tout Russia. I get being disappointed in the U.S., but it's not like Russia by measures of things like freedom, and minority rights and not being tossed into gulags or assassinated for disagreeing with a tin pot tyrant like Putin, the U.S. is a pretty damn good place to be.

[Purveyor]

7. And they found some 'suckers' to buy them. Free-market, capitalism 'on parade', indeed.

[moondust]

4. The U.S. didn't fail.

Orbital Sciences failed using Russian engines, no?

[former9thward]

8. No. No one knows why it failed at this point.

Just that it did.

[Nye Bevan]

6. Edward Snowden must be feeling very smug right about now.

And I, for one, am hanging my head in shame. What a glorious leader Putin is.