Showing posts with label Orbital Sciences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Orbital Sciences. Show all posts

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Names have been changed to protect the guilty

That Wallops Island rocket crash last week.  The one they are blaming on Russian built engines.  The company called itself "Orbital Sciences"  and the failed rocket they called "Antares".
   Funny, up until the disaster at Wallops Island, the company was known as "United Launch Association" or "ULA" and the vehicle was called "Atlas".   ULA was formed some years ago when Boeing and Lockheed decided to stop competing for NASA business, and spun off their space divisions.  The two spun off divisions promptly merged, creating ULA.  Their vehicle,Atlas, despite the Russian engines, has a pretty good record launching commercial comm sats, and military payloads (recon sats probably).
   Up until last week, Aviation Week worried about the Russian engines, and the possibility of the Russians cutting off the supply of engines in a tit for tat over Ukraine sanctions.  And they said, several times, that the cost of developing a US built engine would be prohibitive.  Well, last release to the popular (low information) press blamed the disaster on the Russian engines and announced that they would be replaced, with a yet to be named, US engine.  Nothing like an explosion filmed in full color to expedite the decision making process. 

Update:    Nov 7 20014.  Aviation Week came in this morning.  Apparently I am wrong, there ARE two US rocket operations, both using Russian built engines.  Aviation Week discusses both.  ULA and Atlas use a big Russian engine still in production, Orbital Science and Antares are using an old Russian engine, going back to the 1960's.  Sorry about the misinformation.