NASA have just released these images of the Antares rocket explosion past year, showing us the fiery inferno in which the rocket ended its life on Wallops Island in Virginia.
Advertisement
To chip away at the supply backlog until the Antares is flying again, Orbital has purchased a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket to make a space station delivery in early December from Cape Canaveral.
The new pictures are posted on the NASA website.
NASA split the initial $3.6 billion cargo-flight contract between SpaceX and Orbital in 2008, two years after Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. sent its first rocket aloft. A SpaceX Falcon 9 launch failure in June ended all U.S.-based supply runs. The current cargo haulers Orbital ATK and SpaceX expect to continue their services.
The photos were released on NASA’s Flickr page just days after the space agency issued a report that said the explosion took place within the Antares’ AJ-26 rocket engine, a refurbished engine that had been built decades before for the ultimately aborted Soviet lunar program. Flights are expected to resume next spring. “To a certain extent, it’s a moot point because NASA doesn’t have a lot of choices”.
Orbital Sciences announced it would discontinue use of the Russian engines by 2016.
The paper notes reasons ranged from the engine’s bearings and internal debris to a defect in the turbine’s housing.
Advertisement
The probe said any one of the three potential causes, or a combination of them, could have triggered the explosion.
