Translated material
Six seconds of flight Antares
The Guardian understands the circumstances of the crash of the missile with the Soviet engine
On Wednesday night, on October 29, 6 seconds after the start of the Wallops cosmodrome in Virginia, the USA, the Antares launch vehicle exploded. She carried a load for the International Space Station. In the rocket produced by the American company Orbital, Soviet engines of 40 years ago are used.
According to The Guardian, Antares was supposed to deliver 2200 kg of cargo to the ISS, including food, tools, devices for scientific experiments, including some classified cryptographic equipment. Antares cargoes did not transport critical for the life of the ISS.
The explosion occurred during the work of the first stage of the launch vehicle. As a result of the incident, no one was injured, but the cosmodrome infrastructure was damaged. In Orbital, the cause of the missiles has not yet been revealed.
The Antares missile uses the space engines of Aerojet Rocketdyne, which are actually finalized by the Soviet liquid reactive engines NK-33, intended for the lunar program of the USSR. After its closure, the engines were mothballed; Then Aerojet acquired them and transported them to the United States.
The Orbital representative said that the work of engines used in the first stage of Antares is well studied, they are recognized as reliable. Orbital intentions to use these engines were previously criticized by the founder of SpaceX Elon Musk. “Their missiles, to be honest, is some kind of mockery. They have Soviet engines that were made in the 1960s. I mean-they did not come up with in the 1960s. They really build a rocket based on engines that they produced in the 1960s and have since stored somewhere in Siberia, ”Musk said in an interview with 2012. Mask company is an Orbital competitor for commercial delivery of goods to space.
“Orbital technology has been criticized by competitors all the time, but in recent years the company successfully delivered cargo to the ISS, despite the opposition of the US Congress, which opens the dependence of NASA on commercial partners” (English.).