Originally published January 4, 2015 at 5:25 PM | Page modified January 4, 2015 at 9:21 PM<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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 agencys concern. <\/p>\n
The engines had a fundamental flaw in the materials, said a top manager for NASAs 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. <\/p>\n
They were never designed to be in storage that long, said the Orbital manager, Ken Eberly, deputy director for the rocket program. <\/p>\n
The explosion, just seconds after liftoff from a Virginia launchpad on Oct. 28, destroyed tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded supplies, experiments and equipment, all bound for the International Space Station. <\/p>\n
The episode has raised questions about NASAs oversight of a new program to hire private contractors to carry cargo and astronauts to orbit, rather than operate the spacecraft itself. <\/p>\n
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. The company and NASA tried to address the risk by X-raying the engines to find cracks and patching them with welds. <\/p>\n
NASA officials knew before the October explosion that the fix had not worked as well as intended. In May, an overhauled engine exploded during a test at NASAs Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. <\/p>\n
Under NASAs contract with Orbital, taxpayers shoulder most of the risk of a catastrophe. The company receives as much as 80 percent of its fee for each launch even if the rocket explodes. <\/p>\n
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Before explosions, NASA knew aging Soviet engines could crack, leak fuel<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Originally published January 4, 2015 at 5:25 PM | Page modified January 4, 2015 at 9:21 PM 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. Continue reading