Posted on 10/29/2014 8:19:42 AM PDT by AngelesCrestHighway
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 didnt 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 Thursdays 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Thanks Obama!
How many failures vs successes.
From there the next question is who else does the same job and what is their failure/success ratio.
“Instead, all four launches of the mighty N1 Soviet rocket, which used an earlier iteration of the first-stage engines used in Thursdays launch, failed between 1969 and 1972...”
So we use their unreliable rocket engines and blow up millions of dollars worth of equipment...
Using decades-old Soviet engines is one way to pay for Obamacare and free cell phones.............
Spot on ! Obama’s space program!
So who owns Orbital Sciences and who is connected to the Obama admin to receive the $ 1.9 billion contract to make eight supply missions to the International Space Station with outdated and useless Soviet equipment? Sounds like the Soviets quit using these rockets decades ago.
How much damage was done to Nasa (tax payer’s)equipment?
I guess they’re not exactly rocket scientists.
A Cadillac with a Trabant engine
Well, the whole program was farmed out to Orbital Sciences. And they probably got a screaming deal at the USSR Going Out of Business Sale.
I had heard it this way: The engines the Sovs developed were good engines. The problem with the N1 rocket was that the Sovs didn’t believe in using BIG engines (like the F-1’s that boosted the Saturn V’s 1st stage), but a bunch of smaller ones. They came up with a control system that they THOUGHT might work at keeping all the engines coordinated and synchronized. They found that their system didn’t work. The way they found out was by their ‘mighty’ N1’s blowing up.
Now, if they’re using engines that were manufactured in the Soviet Union 40 years ago, and have been sitting in some warehouse in Novosibirsk until we refurbished them, then yes...they’re idiots.
If they built them recently....then just chalk it up to experience.
Feces Occurs.
My first thought was of a possible raghead on the launch crew. But with THIS additional info, that we paid untold $$$$ for a bunch of Putin’s army surplus, POS junk that didn’t even work when it was NEW, it all comes into focus. Another type of Solyndra ripoff to Obola’s credit.
In the video, it looked like the engine sprang a leak and then thrust diminished followed by a couple of Big Bangs after it hit the ground.
Putin gets the last laugh!
I remembered reading about these soviet rockets NASA is using..”The RD-180 engine powers the first stage of United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Atlas 5 rocket, which is used almost exclusively to launch American military satellites and other government payloads.” from this article..”Russian Rocket Engine Ban on US Military Launches Could Affect NASA Spaceflight” http://www.space.com/25876-russia-rocket-engines-american-spaceflight.html
“..there are not many other options around the world in terms of using power plants of this size,..”
Once upon a time in America, if this sentence was read or heard, there would be an American company, one or more, which would say, “O yeh!’ And in a short time one would be in production superior to what anyone could imagine. We have lost that zeal. If a design engineer doesn’t get a fat government handout, he/she won’t do it.
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