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 agency's concern. <\/p>\n
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. <\/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 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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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 NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. <\/p>\n
Under NASA's contract with Orbital, taxpayers shoulder most of the risk of a catastrophe. The company receives as much as 80% of its fee for each launch even if the rocket explodes. <\/p>\n
NASA has not said how much the destroyed cargo was worth. The government will also spend up to $20 million to repair damage the explosion caused to the Virginia launch facility, according to legislation approved in December. <\/p>\n
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Before explosion, NASA knew aging Soviet engines could crack, leak fuel<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. Continue reading