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n2doc

(47,953 posts)
Sun Jan 4, 2015, 03:56 PM Jan 2015

Before explosion, NASA knew aging Soviet engines posed risks



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.

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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nasa-rocket-failures-20150104-story.html#page=1
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Before explosion, NASA knew aging Soviet engines posed risks (Original Post) n2doc Jan 2015 OP
At least nobody was in it this time jakeXT Jan 2015 #1

jakeXT

(10,575 posts)
1. At least nobody was in it this time
Sun Jan 4, 2015, 04:10 PM
Jan 2015

Engineer Who Opposed Challenger Launch Offers Personal Look at Tragedy

On January 28, 1986, as the Space Shuttle Challenger broke up over the Atlantic Ocean 73 seconds into its flight, Allan McDonald looked on in shock -- despite the fact that the night before, he had refused to sign the launch recommendation over safety concerns.

McDonald, the director of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project for the engineering contractor Morton Thiokol, was concerned that below-freezing temperatures might impact the integrity of the solid rockets' O-rings.

He would soon learn that his worst fears had come true. But as he watched the Challenger disintegrate at the Launch Control Center that cold, sunny January morning, he was baffled. He had predicted that if the O-rings were to fail, the rockets would explode before the shuttle ever lifted off from the launch site. Instead, following the break-up, the rockets remained intact and continued flying.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_Colloquium1012.html

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