Russian deliver space station cargo after US flop

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By BROCK VERGAKIS and MARCIA DUNN

ATLANTIC, Va. (AP) — The company behind the dramatic launch explosion of a space station supply mission promises to find the cause of the failure and is warning residents to avoid any potentially hazardous wreckage.

Orbital Sciences Corp.'s unmanned Antares rocket blew up just moments after liftoff Tuesday evening from the Virginia coast.

Meanwhile, early Wednesday, the Russian Space Agency launched its own cargo vessel from Kazakhstan and the spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station six hours later with 3 tons of food. The smooth flight was in stark contrast to the Orbital Sciences' failed launch, and had been planned well in advance of the accident.

The Orbital Sciences rocket was carrying a Cygnus capsule loaded with 2½bd} tons of space station experiments and equipment for NASA. No one was injured when the rocket exploded moments after liftoff, shooting flaming debris down onto the launch area and into the ocean.

FULL story at link.



An unmanned Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket headed for the International Space Station lifts off from the Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va. on Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2014 shortly before exploding. No injuries were reported following the first catastrophic launch in NASA's commercial spaceflight effort. (AP Photo/Eastern Shore News, Jay Diem)


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20141029/us--space_station-cfefd7d27e.html

[KoKo]

1. Cooperation is better than Bullying.........

This is one hand helping the other in an ongoing joint project. Yet there can't be cooperation on other issues?

[upaloopa]

2. The Air Force could have launched that rocket

here at Vandenberg no problem. Too bad we have to privatize everything.
I was taking graduate classes at Vandenberg when our prof said "this doesn't take a rocket scientist. Oh, most of you are rocket scientists." I was in a class with Air Force students from the Space Command.

[former9thward]

5. Any rockets fired from Vandenberg are privately built.

The Air Force does not build rockets. The rocket launching facility was privately built. The base was privately built.

[seabeckind]

8. According to contractural guidelines determined by gov't engineers.

Paid for by the taxpayer.

Doesn't matter who built it. We own it.

The operation in question here appears to be one where the private corporation did everything and all we got was the bill.

[former9thward]

11. Not really.

The government says 'We want a rocket that can deliver this size payload to this orbit'. Private companies do the rest. The government does not design the rocket.

[Major Hogwash]

17. Yes, really!

The federal government sets out the specifications for the items they want to purchase, and then the company builds them to the federal government's specifications.
It's obvious that you don't know much about federal government procurements.

[former9thward]

18. No, you don't know much about major Defense based companies.

[Major Hogwash]

19. Hahaha!!!!!!

[upaloopa]

13. All our military equipment is privately built

Guns, planes, ships, tanks all are privately built.
Just that the civilians and military at Vandenberg are good at what they do.

[BlueEye]

16. What isn't "privately built" at some level?

The NASA and the military are both public-private partnerships. There are varying degrees of government control over design processes and procedures, with "true NASA" activities enjoying a high degree of NASA engineering, thus we consider it "public sector." But the private sector is still instrumental in these projects. Rockwell Collins built the Space Shuttle. Boeing, Douglas, and IBM were instrumental in building the Saturn V. Northrop Grumman built the lunar lander. Etc.

[jakeXT]

12. t minus 3 something

http://www.reuters.com/news/us

[lovuian]

3. Russians can do it but we can't

Bush retired the Shuttle with no other back up
Republicans don't look ahead to the future and here is an example

Let's face it
The World knows our technological prowess is on the downhill spiral

If we don't educate our children then we will lose our technological edge

that means in a WWIII .....Russia and China may have the advantage .....

[truthisfreedom]

4. SpaceX does it just fine.

Borscht for you!

[former9thward]

6. Obama has had 6 years to reverse that decision.

The last Space Shuttle mission was in 2011 during Obama's watch. If he disagreed with the decision he could have continued the program.

Our technology is not decreasing. Most technology based companies are U.S. based. The reason we don't have a space program is a lack of money -- not technology. Until we get the Defense budget under control this will only continue like a cancer.

[seabeckind]

9. 6 years is nothing.

The whole contracting out movement has been going on for 40 years and just gains momentum every year. It's a self-generating system.

The mba who gets in a position of choosing those who would implement his policies will call the shots for many, many years. The only way Obama could have changed the direction of that movement would have been a major shakeup in the executive branch. Aside from the political pushback, just how would he choose the people to change that direction?

Hel, he couldn't even do it at Treasury.

You really think Rahm would have helped? He's the one who vetted the ones that are there.

You think Hill will change it?

[jakeXT]

7. The rocket was built in Russia and failed in the 60's

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.

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

"The results are pretty crazy," Musk said in the 2012 interview. "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."


http://abcnews.go.com/Business/elon-musk-called-orbital-sciences-rocket-design-joke/story?id=26540137

[Adrahil]

21. Ummm Orbital Sciences uses RUSSIAN. Rocket engines.... NT

[jakeXT]

25. Not everything in plastic bags is new

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.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/10/29/359869360/russian-engines-could-be-focus-of-antares-launch-failure-probe

[ballyhoo]

10. Russians to the rescue as the man nods knowingly...

[IMG][/IMG]

[Purveyor]

15. {{{chuckle}}} eom

[Phlem]

14. *sigh* just

fucking embarrassing.

[progressoid]

20. Hooray! `

Good thing we won the cold war.

We won right?

[jakeXT]

22. The winner gets the good stuff

[progressoid]

24. That was interesting.

I hadn't seen that before.

[KamaAina]

23. So the astronauts have to eat powdered borscht?