We kicked the Russians arses in the race to space and American footprints are still on the moon. American ingenuity has turned into outsourcing and outreaching.
Via LA Times
Years before an unmanned rocket erupted in a fireball in October, NASA officials knew the metal in its 50-year-old Soviet-made engines could crack, causing fuel to leak and ignite, government documents show.
As early as 2008, a NASA committee warned about the “substantial” risk of using the decades-old engines, and a fire during a 2011 engine test in Mississippi heightened the agency’s concern.
The engines had a “fundamental flaw in the materials,” said a top manager for NASA’s contracted rocket builder, Orbital Sciences, in a 2013 interview with an agency historian. The Soviet engines were built in the 1960s and 1970s in a failed attempt to take cosmonauts to the moon.
“They were never designed to be in storage that long,” said the Orbital manager, Ken Eberly, deputy director for the rocket program.
The explosion, just seconds after liftoff from a Virginia launch pad on Oct. 28, destroyed tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded supplies, experiments and equipment, all bound for the International Space Station. The episode has raised questions about NASA’s oversight of a new program to hire private contractors to carry cargo and astronauts to orbit, rather than operate the spacecraft itself.
The program aimed to encourage private industry to develop innovative, safe and reliable spacecraft, and ideally save money. But NASA and Orbital officials knew the decades-old engines posed a danger before the agency awarded the company a $1.9-billion deal to launch eight missions.