Orbital, Aerojet Rocketdyne Disagree on Cause of Antares Explosion
A massive explosion occurred right after the Antares rocket hit the ground.
After the explosion of an Antares rocket in October, NASA left the investigation in the hands of the company’s that bands of the company that built and launched the rocket, Orbital Sciences Corporation (now Orbital ATK). Yesterday, we got the first official word on what that investigation has found. And it’s very confusing.
Orbital ATK Executive Vice President Ronald Grabe said during the 31st Space Symposium that the failure was caused by excessive wear in the bearings of a turbo pump for one of the two first-stage AJ-26 engines supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Grabe said the company’s report would be turned over to the Federal Aviation Administration within days.
So, mystery solved. Responsible party identified. Orbital not at fault.
Not so fast, says Aerojet Rocketdyne’s parent company.
GenCorp spokesman Glenn Mahone said the company’s independent investigation would be completed in about three weeks, but the bulk of the work had been done. He said Orbital’s statement was “inaccurate and could be misleading.” He said GenCorp’s investigation had also identified excessive wear of the bearings as the direct cause of the explosion that destroyed the rocket, but further research revealed that the bearings likely wore out due to “foreign object debris” in the engine.
The debris (known as FOD) would probably have been sucked in from one of the fuel tanks, which are built by a Ukrainian company. It was Orbital’s responsibility to make sure no debris was present in the tanks before mating.
Meanwhile, NASA is conducting its own assessment of the launch failure, which destroyed an agency-funded Cygnus spacecraft that was headed for the International Space Station. NASA has no plans to release that report publicly.
Orbital has decided not to continue using AJ-26 engines, which 40-year old refurbished NK-33 motors left over from the Soviet Union’s manned lunar program. Instead, they are switching over to new Russian-built RD-181 engines.
Even with the engine change, the inability of the parties to identify a root cause is disturbing because it’s happened before. In 2009, Orbital launched NASA’s $278 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory into the ocean after the payload shroud of its Taurus XL booster failed to separate.
Two years later, Orbital did it again, destroying NASA’s $424 million Glory satellite when the payload shroud again failed to separate on the Taurus XL launch vehicle. In between the flights, Orbital said it had identified and fixed problem, but engineers did not appear to have identified the root cause.
One really has to question the decision to allow Orbital to investigate itself on the Antares failure. And why is NASA keeping its own inquiry secret?
I don’t know if that is stipulated in NASA’s commercial cargo agreement Orbital, but it raises questions about whether the public will get a clear answer as to what caused the failure. NASA funded the mission and paid Orbital the majority of the contracted amount despite the fact Cygnus go nowhere near the space station.
13 responses to “Orbital, Aerojet Rocketdyne Disagree on Cause of Antares Explosion”
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They have no contract with Russians for NK33. Aerojet imported engines years ago.
I think he actually meant that NOW that they won’t be using the NK-33s, they will have to deal with Russians (with their RD-181s).
This is why single company owning all points of manufacturing is better. They do not try to blame others, they just fix issue.
Just to be ornery, so Boeing should manufacture its own engines? Dell should make its own integrated circuits, Ford should make tires?
IBM historically did their own circuits, since nobody did them at the time. They’re still doing them for their mainframes. (From what I understand, Dell never really invented, designed, or manufactured anything of substance, so it’s obviously a lousy example.)
Rocket engines simply still aren’t at the point where you could just go and shop for one among a dozen competitive manufacturers offering substitutable units with comparable parameters.
A high degree of vertical integration has worked well for SpaceX, but there is no such thing as one “best” way to do business. If there was, everyone would do business that way and everyone would succeed. Obviously, that doesn’t happen in the real world. Space is hard. So is business.
“Meanwhile, NASA is conducting its own assessment of the launch failure, which destroyed an agency-funded Cygnus spacecraft that was headed for the International Space Station. NASA has no plans to release that report publicly.“
Good idea; it’s not like the public paid for it! Best to keep this sort of thing in-house, I always say. Let the little people have their theories.
“In 2009, Orbital launched NASA’s $278 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory into the ocean…”
Yes, yes — but did it ever find any of that famous ‘orbiting carbon’ down there? Launched it straight into the ocean, you say. Extraordinary!
Of course it did. It just could not report on it because OSC broke the antenna.
Isn’t the fairing failures (OCO-1 and Glory) different from the engine failure (Antares resupply to ISS)? Anyway I’m happy Orbital will stop scraping the bottom of the barrel with old Russian rocket engines. The 1990’s paradigm of leveraging Soviet era space assets by American corporations is rapidly coming to an end.
There is nobody in Russia building NK-33s today anyway. For Russia this
is a win, they gained a customer for their RD-181s, not lost a customer
for the NK-33s (as Douglas Messier wrote above: those have already been sold years ago).
People tend to forget that the NK-33s are literally left overs from the Soviet Unions Lunar program. Nobody has build any NK-33 in decades, the ones Aerojet bought and refurbished as AJ-26s had been in Storage in a shed somewhere in Russia. After the end of the Lunar program, everything was ordered to be destroyed (can’t have evidence of past failures in a totalitarian regime). However some engineers where appalled at destroying what some considered to be the most advanced engine of the time, and decided to hide them at a secret location instead.
NK-33 production line restart was recently contemplated, though. Of course, with the RD-18x/19x in production, the need for it is greatly diminished.
Can you please provide a source for those “contracts” you are claiming exist? As far as I know, there is none. Aerojet bought X number of NK-33s back in the day, in addition to the design of the engine. I think there was some talk about an option for restarting production if there was enough demand, but that option has never been used.
As I understand it, Aerojet could even start construction of the engine themselves if they really want to.