The Antares rocket exploded seconds after lift-off
By Will Goodbody, Science & Technology Correspondent
Some are calling it a disaster. That’s a pretty strong word to use when talking about an exploding rocket, which thankfully didn’t injure or kill anyone.
But make no mistake about it. The short, dramatic and costly end to the fourth flight of the Antares rocket carrying the Cygnus cargo vessel to the International Space Station (ISS) from the launch pad in Virginia on Tuesday night is a massive setback to the US space program.
Since the shuttle fleet was retired for cost and safety reasons in 2011, the US has relied on commercial operators to fill the void left behind. Two companies, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Dulles based Orbital Sciences won the $3.5bn in contracts to run resupply missions to the ISS on Nasa’s behalf.
Prior to Tuesday night’s “mishap” (as Nasa understatedly described it) all had been going reasonably well. As well as a test flight, Orbital Sciences had successfully flown two missions to the ISS without major incident. While SpaceX was preparing for its fourth.
The idea behind the US’s policy on space exploration is simple. Why bury huge amounts of public money into flying relatively short and straightforward trips into low earth orbit, when the private sector can do it for a lot less? By contracting commercial operators to carry out such missions, it then by extension frees up further Nasa funding and personnel to work on longer term more ambitious projects, like travelling to Mars and grabbing an asteroid.
But all this is predicated on the premise that the commercial operators can do what they are being paid to do, without blowing up rockets, their cargo and the launch pad in the process. A premise which was spectacularly blown out of the sky earlier this week.
Much more significant, however, is that Nasa’s policy of using private companies for low earth orbit transport missions is not just confined to cargo. Last month the space agency announced that it had selected Boeing and SpaceX as its preferred contractors to fly astronauts to and from the ISS on “space taxis”. Right now, Nasa has no capability to put its own astronauts into orbit – an embarrassing situation for a global superpower that has led space exploration, and one which needs to be rectified quickly.
Tuesday night’s explosion at the Wallops facility will have sent a shiver up the spines of Nasa managers, astronauts and presumably the bosses of Boeing and SpaceX. To all those who watched, it immediately evoked memories of the Challenger and Columbia disasters – tragic chapters in space exploration that nobody ever wants to see repeated.
Investigations are only now getting underway into what caused the mission failure on Tuesday. And it is way too early to apportion blame to one particular company, person or team. Attention is focused right now on the Russian built engines in the first stage or main rocket. But in reality rocket science is exceptionally technical, sensitive and dangerous work. Many other factors could have led to the explosion. And let’s face it, public sector space organisations, including Nasa, haven’t exactly got an exemplary safety record. Accident can, and do happen.
But it is likely that the incident will lead to a cold eye being cast, once again, over Nasa’s decision to privatise such a significant part of its operations. And ironically, while the Russian built engines are being scrutinised to see if they were at fault, Nasa will in the meantime become even more reliant on Russian space technology to supply its section of the ISS over the coming months, until they get to the bottom of what caused Tuesday’s $200m “mishap”.
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