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A supply rocket carrying cargo and experiments to the ISS exploded shortly after liftoff. NASA and Orbital Sciences (the company operating the rocket) have not released any information about what may have caused the incident, pending further investigation.
The mission was unmanned, and all personnel are safe and accounted for. The extent of the damage to the launch facility has not yet been determined.
Phil Plait, author of the Bad Astronomy blog speculates that the 60s-70s era refurbished Russian engines the vehicle used will come under heavy scrutiny.
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ISS Resupply Rocket Explodes Shortly after Launch
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MONTALBAN'S HAIR!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by gman003 on Wednesday October 29 2014, @03:18PM
OSC was already in the process of moving from warehoused Soviet NK-33s to American-made NK-33 clones, since Russia cut off their supply due to politics (Ukraine). If it was an engine design problem, they can fix it pretty cheaply at the same time. They can minimize political damage to the company by scapegoating Russia, and saying "this is why we're building American from now on!".
I don't think the entire contract will be dropped from them just from this. Things do go wrong from time to time. However, OSC is going to have a harder time getting future customers, because the insurance rates are going to go up (launch customers almost always insure their payload).
There are relatively few new engines that are flying.
The Russians have the RD-0124 flying on the new Soyuz. The Proton main engine was upgraded in the 90s. Other than that, they're just reusing old engines in new vehicles (including, surprisingly, a lot of Energia engines).
The Europeans are fairly new, with Ariane 5 using 90s-era engines. Same with Japan and India. They aren't doing anything really exotic, and they're mostly following the 70s-NASA school of design (solid boosters and LH2 engines).
As for America, I'll break it down by company:
Orbital Sciences uses literal leftovers. They've been turning Minuteman and Peacekeeper missiles into launch vehicles in the Minotaur series, and the Antares has already been discussed. Pegasus is technically new, but it only launches tiny satellites.
Lockheed Martin uses old engines, both Russian (the RD-180 is derived from the Energia's boosters) and American (the RL10 is from the Saturn I upper stage). They aren't really a bad design, but they are old.
Boeing uses a derivative of the Space Shuttle engines. It's heavily modified, but actually worse than the SSMEs because they focused on cost, not performance.
SpaceX does use a truly new design. The Merlin is a very by-the-book design, but they use modern manufacturing and design tools to make a very good by-the-book engine. Their specific impulse is unremarkable (and downright shoddy compared to the LH2/LOX rockets popular in America right now), but their thrust-to-weight ratio is first-class. Their next design, Raptor, is much more ambitious, and actually kind of revolutionary. It hasn't actually been built yet, but if they pull it off, it's gonna be amazing.
There are some other new American designs in the works. The J-2X is the only really new one, and even that one started out as an upgrade of the Apollo-era J-2 before they decided to make it a completely new engine.
Nope. We don't even have blueprints for some of it anymore - we recently had to reverse-engineer the F-1 (Saturn V first-stage main engines) when it was considered as a booster for SLS.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday October 29 2014, @05:07PM
What's the status of closed cycle (staged combustion) type of rockets? is such ones manufactured currently?
Is there any company besides SpaceX that tries to move the technology forward? otoh, cost is an important factor.
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Wednesday October 29 2014, @05:12PM
Most of them are staged combustion now. Russia's big on it (they figured out the metallurgy for hot oxidizer-heavy flows before we did), and most of the LH2 engines are staged combustion (because if you're going to use such an expensive fuel, you aren't going to waste it).