The
explosion
of an unmanned U.S. rocket to the International Space Station late
Tuesday has shone a spotlight on America’s reliance on overseas space
hardware, some of which dates back to Soviet era Russia.
Built by Dulles, Va.-based Orbital Sciences as part of a $1.9 billion
contract with NASA, the Antares rocket exploded in a fireball just 6
seconds after liftoff from Wallops Island in Virginia.
It’s too early to say what caused the blast, according to Orbital
Sciences and NASA. During a press conference late on Tuesday, however,
Orbital Sciences executive vice president Frank Culbertson was quizzed
about Orbital’s use of refurbished Russian engine hardware.
“We don’t know whether the engine was involved in this or not,” he
said. “That’s something that we will try to determine as quickly as
possible.”
Orbital uses AJ26 rocket engines from Aerojet Rocketdyne. The engines
are a "commercial derivative" of the NK-33 engine that was initially
developed to power the Russian N-1 rocket on a lunar mission in the
early 1970s, according to Sacramento, Calif.-based Aerojet.
“Basically, this was an engine that was designed to carry cosmonauts
to the moon – a number of them were bought by Aerojet several years ago
to be refurbished and ‘Americanized’ and provided to American industry,”
explained Culbertson. “It’s an extensively tested engine – it’s very
robust and rugged.”
The Orbital Sciences executive added that no “anomalies” or other issues indicating a problem were identified during testing.
Culbertson also acknowledged the difficulties getting hold of rocket
hardware, particularly in the U.S. “When you look at it, there are not
very many other options around the world, in terms of using power plants
of this size, and certainly not in this country, unfortunately,” he
said.
Chris Carberry, executive director of Explore Mars, a non-profit
organization which aims to advance the goal of sending humans to Mars
within the next two decades, told FoxNews.com that the U.S. has to be
careful not to become over-reliant on foreign technology to support its
space program.
“The U.S. has been taking steps to become less reliant on Russian
engines as a result of recent tensions with Russia,” he noted, in an
email to FoxNews.com.
The U.S. Air Force, for example, is
seeking out alternatives to Russian rocket engines for its satellite launches.
Set against this backdrop, Orbital Sciences’ rival SpaceX has been
vocal about the fact that it builds its own rocket engines. SpaceX CEO
Elon Musk even
poked fun at Orbital Sciences’ engine technology during a 2012 interview.
Last month NASA
awarded
its highly-anticipated space taxi contract to Boeing and SpaceX, which
aims to end the agency’s reliance on Russian technology to transport
U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station.
Underlining the failure the Antares launch, however, Russia successfully
launched its own unmanned supply ship to the International Space Station early on Wednesday.
John Logsdon, professor emeritus of political science and
international affairs at George Washington University's Space Policy
Institute, told FoxNews.com that both the Obama and the Bush
administrations have not provided adequate funding for "a high-quality
U.S. space effort."
Orbital Science's use of old Russian engines also reflects the global character of the space business, according to Logsdon.
"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."
Carberry told FoxNews.com the cause of the Antares blast must be
determined as quickly as possible. The incident’s impact on Orbital
Sciences “will depend on how quickly a cause of the failure can be
determined and fixed - and how quickly the launch pad can be repaired,”
he said.
Roger Franzen, technical manager of the Giant Magellan Telescope at
the Australian National University’s Mount Stromlo Observatory just
outside Canberra, said that the business of launching rockets is fraught
with difficulties.
“As the 4th launch of Antares, it could be reasonably considered as
still in the proving stage and most new rocket systems will require a
convergence to reliability after bugs are ironed out, despite all the
design and test rigour,” he said, in an email to FoxNews.com. “Launching
rockets remains a risky business and in the end, every payload is
riding on top of a controlled explosion.”
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