Posted on 05/24/2014 8:49:40 PM PDT by BenLurkin
A Russian built rocket engine planned for future use in the first stage of Orbital Sciences Corp. commercial Antares rocket launching to the International Space Station failed during pre-launch acceptance testing on Thursday afternoon, May 22, at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
...
The test was initiated at about 3:00 p.m. EDT on Thursday and the anomaly occurred approximately 30 seconds into the planned 54-second test.
“It terminated prematurely, resulting in extensive damage to the engine,” Orbital said in a statement.
An investigation into the incident by Aerojet and NASA has begun. The cause of the failure is not known.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Sucker blew up.
It is not for us to know when the coconut falls, just make sure you are not underneath the tree.
yup that was exactly the way I translated it
NasaSpaceflight.com, May 22, 2014: "One of the AJ-26 engines set to launch with a future Antares rocket has failed during testing at the Stennis Space Center on Thursday. Sources claim the engine “exploded” on a Stand located in the E Complex at the famous rocket facility. The failure is currently under evaluation, although it may delay the next Antares launch that is tasked with lofting the the ORB-2 Cygnus to the International Space Station (ISS)."
Well, it might have only been one “part” of the engine that done blew up.
The rest might be still be okay, right? 8<)
Why the F, are we using Russian rockets?
I know the answer, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.
We’ve got a president outsourcing our key national security to our avowed enemies. Just wonderful.
It’s a shame that our governments regulations prevent any company in our nation from building rocket engines that can do this job. But what the hey, who needs those type of ungreen jobs anyway?
Don’t worry. SpaceX is going to put these guys out of business in a few years.
Damn, that’s some serious firepower. Boom Boom.
The NK-33 and NK-43 are rocket engines designed and built in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Kuznetsov Design Bureau. The NK designation is presumably derived from the name of the chief designer, Nikolay Kuznetsov. They were intended for the ill-fated Soviet N-1 rocket moon shot. The NK-33 engine is among the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any Earth-launchable rocket engine (second only to SpaceX Merlin 1D engine), while achieving a very high specific impulse. NK-33 was by many measures the highest performance LOX/kerosene rocket engine ever created.
Produces plenty of thrust when it self detonates. The country that manufactured the most successful rocket engine in history, the Saturn 5 has been reduced to using soviet era rocket engines, Kruschev was right, and the mighty have fallen. We took ourselves out.
Supposedly the Russians innovated in ways our engineers deemed impossible. It does not matter that they were slaves of the state, they gambled in terms of design and it paid off. The previous three sets of engines for the rocket have already performed well.
Those things our engineers deemed impossible may well have been things that had a higher probability of causing a destructive malfunction.
To the Soviets launching rockets from the desert steppe of Kazakhstan under nobody’s eyes but their own, a catastrophic failure has a different effect than a catastrophic launch failure from a launch center in view of millions of people.
They likely had a higher institutional tolerance for failure (even if the tolerance for individual failure was close to zero)
How embarrassing.
Read that the engines in question wre once ordered destoyed by the USSR 40 years ago but were stuck in a warehouse by a independently minded bureaucrat. Thus they are refurbished!
LOL...Soviet bureaucrats...a breed all of their own.
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