Rocket Delayed, Explodes Upon Launch

It seems the unmanned Orbital Science’s rocket that was planned to launch this week just couldn’t catch a break. First the launch date was postponed from Monday to Tuesday due to space junk nearing the International Space Station. When the launch was finally attempted, the rocket promptly exploded. Thankfully, neither of these events caused any injuries… except for the wallets of those involved.

How did things go so wrong?

The International Space Station (ISS) had to dodge a piece of space debris on Monday. Had the ISS stayed on its original path, it would have passed within just a few hundred metres of the wreckage. The aforementioned Orbital Science rocket was carrying a Cygnus module with supplies for the ISS, but its Monday launch was postponed to avoid the junk.

The ‘junk’ in question was the remains of the Russian Kosmos 2251 satellite, which had collided with the American Iridium 33 satellite in 2009. That had been the first accidental hypervelocity collision of two intact spacecraft. It was an eerie reminder of the fate the ISS crew had dodged that day. That collision and this subsequent near miss demonstrates how debris from collisions make future collisions more likely. This effect is called the “Kessler Syndrome” (named after NASA physicist Donald Kessler), and it ends with the creation of a debris belt around Earth. Even a fleck of paint is pretty dangerous if it orbits at Mach 8.8. You should probably buy those Virgin Galactic tickets while it’s still (relatively) safe.

There are plenty of ways space junk could be cleared, in theory. Gels, foams or nets could accumulate waste, fall into the atmosphere, and burn up. Lasers are another possibility, readily available to those with both a time machine and a Get Out of International Crisis Free card. Nobody wants to see their rivals place weapons in space, or find out that a ‘decommissioned’ satellite was involved in a secret surveillance program. Another issue is cost; cleanup apparatus must be launched and refuelled. In some schemes (notably the “stick trash to gel” plan) the cleanup tools, expensive though they may be, must burn along with the refuse it collects.

Speaking of burning large sums of money, the Orbital Science rocket didn’t even leave orbit before annihilating itself. It exploded mere seconds after leaving the launch pad, like a $200 million fireworks display. The explosion was actually intentional: upon noticing engine failure, the safety officer at the launch site sent commands to detonate explosives in the booster. This is standard procedure to prevent faulty rockets from reaching populated areas. The rocket was operated by the Orbital Science corporation, as part of their multi-billion dollar contract with NASA to send supplies to the International Space Station.

Orbital Science is one of the private space firms competing with Elon Musk’s firm SpaceX. This of course makes it an acceptable target of Musk’s mockery. According to Musk, the use of aging engines was one of the cost and risk-cutting measures often used by space corporations. Musk’s SpaceX is one exception (of course), producing several dozen new Falcon 9 rockets every year. Elon Musk described the rockets used by Orbital Science to resupply the ISS in an interview with Wired in 2012. “It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s,” said Musk. “I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s—I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.” While his opinions of the rockets was unfavorable two years ago, upon learning of the explosion Musk tweeted “Hope they recover soon.”

During the 1960s, deep into the space race to the moon, the Soviets built enormous rockets to try beating the US to the chase. The gargantuan rockets exploded frequently, the US reached the moon first and after several more decades the Soviet Union collapsed. There were still many leftover unused engines, which private companies have been able to purchase for relatively low prices. It was a rocket with one of these engines, the Antares AJ-26, which failed on Tuesday. Orbital Science originally defended the rocket system; executive Frank Culbert claimed the rocket was “very robust and rugged”, and that the engines were “refurbished and Americanized” … whatever that entails.

Whether the engines really were the culprit of the crash is still under investigation. It will take weeks to totally survey the crash site, according to space agency officials. One of the factors slowing the investigation is the presence of classified technology on the rocket: the cargo included “class-5 crypto” which needed to be kept out of the hands and eyes of the public.

Top-secret tools of the police state were not the only technology lost in the inferno. One third of the payload was scientific equipment and experiments, all packed into the Cygnus module which was meant to connect to the ISS. One such piece of equipment was the Meteor high definition camera. It would’ve been dedicated to measure trajectories, size and composition of meteors entering Earth’s atmosphere.

A San-Francisco-based firm named Planet Labs was building a network of satellites for an Earth-imaging system. 71 of there satellites (individually called Doves) are currently in orbit. The Antares rocket was carrying an additional 26 satellites. The similarly named Planetary Resources had a asteroid-seeking telescope on the rocket, a piece of its ambition for a space-mining future.

NASA planned to transport two small experiments in the Cygnus module. One was a tiny cubical satellite (measuring a mere 10 x 10 x 30 cm) to study climate change by measuring water in the atmosphere. Another was the Drain Brain medical device, a collar to measure the blood flow between the brain and heart. Drain Brain could’ve been used to help treat astronauts suffering neurological issues.

Several student projects were also jeopardized. A 7th grade class in Kamloops, B.C. designed an experiment to measure the growth of crystals in microgravity. Other student experiments would’ve monitored microgravity effects on pea shoots, mosquito eggs, seeds, chia plants and shrimp.

A more fundamental issue highlighted by these delays and explosions is the changing roles of governments and private entities in the exploration of space. While space-travel was once a government-dominated affair, times are changing quickly. As the space-industrial complex shifts to private hands, will Antares-style disasters become more frequent? And if they do, who’s going to pay the cleaning bill?

Certainly this disaster is nothing too new. Since Sputnik graced radios with its incessant beeping, there have been a total of 453 failed space missions, both manned and unmanned. While it may be easy to blame corporate cost-cutting or Soviet engineering for the rocket failure, the fact of the matter is that sending anything into orbit is costly and difficult, regardless of the organization in charge.

As the United States reins in its government spending, it will just have to accept the growing role of developing countries and private entities in space exploration. In a world India can send a probe to Mars for less than Gravity‘s production cost, and private companies have the ambition to assemble a flock of a hundred satellites in orbit, it is definitely beneficial to collaborate. Compromises will need to be made on all sides, whether it means adjusting trajectories to dodge space junk, pitting corporations against each other to see which one’s rockets perform better, or ferrying a little government-sanctioned “extra” to orbit without telling the public.

Space is the final frontier, humankind’s last great unknown. It is a fine time to get a larger slice of our society involved.