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Slava Ukraini!
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
8 comments:
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Well, the explosion looked to be first stage related, which is the Russian engines and Ukranian equipment and design, LOX and kerosene liquid-fueled. The longer fire at the pad certainly looked to be the upper stage (solid fuel) burning out (witness the arcing chunks and such).
ReplyDeleteThis was the first launch with the extended upper stage configuration. The previous question on how the scrub impacted this is interesting because the first stage is liquid fueled, and that leads to certain time limits. The condition of the pad will be most interesting too.
The pad will be toast... And the Russians are loving it, $71Mil for hitching a ride for equipment/food to the ISS... sigh
ReplyDeleteOld NFO, the Russians had their own supply shit failure a few years back.
ReplyDeleteAnd we still have SpaceX.
ReplyDeleteI'm betting the turbopump let go.
ReplyDeleteThe same thing happened to us on the NSS-8 mission, only we didn't get so far off the pad.
The rangemaster hit the big red button when things started going sideways. Good thing he did, last thing we'd want would be a giant rocket slewing into Chincoteague Island. Too bad about the pad though.
ReplyDeleteFocus has been on the engines. They're a good design, typical Soviet design for that era -- simple, robust, and fundamentally more reliable than something like the very complex SpaceX engine while not being that much worse on a specific impulse basis. *IF* manufactured well. Which is the problem, we all know that Soviet manufacturing in that era was rather iffy, good Sovoks were fond of saying "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." As for the notion that quality cannot be inspected in, to a certain extent that fails for a piece of machinery as simple as the NK-33. It's a common-shaft turbopump and piping attached to a nozzle. We're not talking brain surgery here, just rocket science ;). It will be interesting to see whether whatever failed was part of the NK-33, or was some other system, and if it was part of the NK-33, how did it make it past the inspectors? In the end Orbital Sciences is going to need to actually start manufacturing these engines from scratch itself anyhow, because the supply is limited. It'll be interesting to see if they can manage to do so...
I don't know much about rocket science. But having said that, it does seem that when a rocket just barely lifts off the pad and then starts to settle back down, the first suspect is the turbine that pumps fuel and/or oxidizer to the combustion chamber.
ReplyDelete(Sort of like the first rule in a spousal killing: "It's always the husband.")
The NK-33 has a common turbine that pumps both the fuel and the oxidizer to the combustion chamber. It gets away with that trick because it's designed to use fuel and oxidizer that have the same specific gravity, thus basically has a two-chamber turbopump driven off a common shaft. It's a very simple design. Should be dirt simple to inspect and validate that it's correct. If Orbital Science didn't manage to do that job correctly, this is a Big Deal, because it means that every other engine in their inventory could have similar problems.
ReplyDelete