Reply to post: Re: Depressing

Ex-Soviet engines fingered after Antares ROCKET launch BLAST

cray74

Re: Depressing

"That's because Congress is too incompetent to fund NASA to research and develop a new engine. Orbital would much rather have used new engines IF THEY HAD THEM."

There are several points about the Antares that means your objections sort of miss the point.

1) Antares was privately spec'd, developed, and offered to NASA, not a NASA research project like, say, the Saturn V (which was built privately to NASA specifications). Saying NASA should've built a rocket motor for it sort of misses the point of "private contractor" in this situation.

2) NASA has helped develop some large, powerful liquid fueled engines over the past 20 years, like the Delta IV's RS-68, and the Space Launch Initiative's RS-83 and RS-84. A lot of good, NASA-designed, Congress-funded hardware is out there waiting for customers - if they want it.

3) Aerojet, like a number of US aerospace firms, got very excited at the sight of Rooskie rocket hardware in the early 1990s after the Iron Curtain opened. Whatever else you can say about Russian spaceflight, they made some very high performance, dense-fuel liquid rocket engines while NASA largely got subverted by the Hydrogen Mafia. The NK-33 (Antares) and RD-170/180 engines (Atlas V) work very well (when they work at all). There are good reasons that US aerospace veterans are advertising these motors.

4) Orbital Sciences isn't new to the rocket game. It has built the Pegasus, Minotaur family, and most recently the Antares. Likewise, Aerojet Rocketdyne is not n00b, either - it's got everything from the Shuttle's main engine to the RL-10 under its belt. They knew what they were doing, and they knew they had a lot of other options than the AJ-26.

The renamed NK-33 might've been the wrong choice, but it wasn't because Congress failed to fund NASA's engine development and it wasn't because Orbital Sciences lacked options for first stage engines.

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