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SpaceX is no stranger to delays. The private space firm headed by Elon Musk has pushed back is launch schedule several times in the last few years after rockets have been lost. Now, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says there may be an issue with the Falcon 9 rocket that delays the expected launch of the first manned mission in 2018.
The report from the GAO (just a preliminary release for now) cites issues with the turboblades used in Falcon 9 rockets. These are the components that move fuel from the tanks to engines. The blades apparently have a tendency to develop cracks, which could cause catastrophic failure if they develop or worsen during a launch.
According to NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot (who also has an amazing name) says the agency and SpaceX have been aware of the issue for months (or possibly years). NASA expressed concern to SpaceX that the turboblade cracks presented too great a risk to launch manned missions. Cracks have been found in the turboblades as recently as September 2016.
SpaceX says it has been conducting extensive testing on the Falcon 9 rocket and believes it to be safe. It has made changes to the design of the turboblades in an effort to mitigate the cracking issues. Although, the company may still undertake a full redesign of the blades depending on the upcoming GAO report. If that happens, the manned launch will almost certainly be delayed.
Source:
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/243883-problems-falcon-9-design-delay-manned-missions
(Score: 2) by mrchew1982 on Monday February 06 2017, @04:46PM
Yup. Boeing and Lockheed et. al. Would like you to believe that their designs have always been safe and never had any failures when the truth actually is that the failures were so long ago (or on differently named launcher) that no one remembers. If you look back at their history (and all of the histories of the companies that they bought out or merged with) you'll see plenty of failures where they kept iterating on a design until they got it right. The new rockets that they build are actually slight modifications to old, blown up several times on the road to perfection, proven designs.
What ULA definitely doesn't want anyone to realize is that all of their R&D (and blown up rockets) was done on a cost plus contract with taxpayer money at the height of the cold war...
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Monday February 06 2017, @10:55PM
There was a point, in the early days of Atlas, where Convair (later sold to McDonnell Douglas, then to Lockheed Martin, then spun off into ULA) was promising the government it could bring reliability up to 60%. While extra precautions were taken with the manned versions, no ground-up redesigns were done before Mercury-Atlas launches started, and the Mercury flights had an estimated success chance of 90%. They flew anyways - because mission failure doesn't have to result in loss-of-crew, and they just built the best launch abort system they could. Two out of the nine Mercury-Atlas flights failed - both unmanned test flights, and both would have been survivable if they had been crewed. All four manned flights succeeded.
Parts of that design continue to be used - the Centaur stage used on some later Atlas flights is still used, with only minor changes, on the Atlas V, and it is planned to be used even with the next-generation Vulcan rocket. The Atlas V is going through the process of man-rating as well, since Boeing's entry in the Commercial Crew program will fly on Atlas V. Atlas V has enough weird heritage (the main engine is a Soviet design drawn from the *boosters* of Energia) that if SpaceX is getting shut down for cutting corners that ought to be round anyways, ULA should get shut down for the same reasons.