Tanada wrote:Then they were sold to a US company that paid for them to be refurbished again (seals age and old connections become question marks).
It looks like that's what happened here, fuel nozzel or something flew off it. It's a 40 year old engine built for the N1 lunar rocket, that never was successful:
Tanada, I have to wonder, was this company fully aware of all the history with the Soviet N1 rocket and these engines?
These engines have failed too much, N1's blew up in massive fireballs back in the 70s and that's why it was canceled. And they kept the engines in a warehouse. And now the same engines are blowing up our rockets; these engines should not be used, they didn't work in the 70s, and they're are too old now anyway and nozzles are gonna fly off from age.
This time they lost the bet and the engine failed at 108% of thrust.
Oh, it gets better and better, so they had a 40 year old soviet engine in overdrive. No wonder it blew up. This is outrageous, this company needs investigated by Congress and they need to lost that $2 billion gubbmint contract. They are charging double what spacex is, for a far inferior product, that blows up anyway.
Now NOASA and NTSB and all of that have the expense for an "investigation" and nasa doing this contractor's work for them and seeing if nasa can get russian engines to work on ukrainian stages, but, it's all a bunch of crap we should be using american engines to start with and building it all here, to starter with.
They already completed two successful flights. This was the third flight, which failed. Averaged over the 10 flights the company is getting 225,000,000 from NASA for each launch.
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Yeah, they are charging too much, twice as much as spacex.
And, orbital carries less payload and can't even bring stuff back.
Why are we paying Lockheed prices to a ltitle fly by night thing like this orbital sciences. It's going to wind up giving all commerical space a bad name, congress could cancel all of it and that's not fair to spacex which isn't all screwed up like this orbital sciences is.
I just don't have a good feeling about this company, tanada, and I hope they're never allowed to carry human passengers.
And I realize Elon Musk "is not God" but -- success is success and failure is dangerous in the rocket business.
There's no good reason to pay more for failure and explosions and lost payloads, all on the principle of creating artificial competition for Elon Musk.
Orbital's rockets suck and they don't know what they are doing and they were fools to use these half century old Soviet engines that didn't even work in the 1970s.
Compare that to SpaceX -- they are making their engines, from scratch, and Tanada you say it's too expensive to do that but somehow they do it you know? They charge the gov half what Orbital science charges.
Why use the russian engines at all. And worse, they had it at 108% of capacity well no wonder. I think they're a bunch of cheapskates, looking for profit #1, that's dangerous nasa needs to drop this company like a hot potato.