A piece at Forbes, quoting Dennis Wingo. I love this:
When contacted for comment, Orbital Sciences spokesperson Sean Wilson refused to be drawn into a discussion of the malfunctioning launcher’s problems.
“Until the investigation is complete, we can’t speculate on what caused the failure,” Wilson told Forbes.
Of course you can. You’re not under a gag order. You’re just using that as an excuse to not do so.
From personal experience, it is never “alright” to speculate outside of the specific group tasked with the anomaly resolution. Nothing good for the company ever comes from such a policy. When the likely problem has been agreed on then release the information.
I’m not talking about talking about the anomaly resolution. I’m talking about talking about their propulsion options in the future.
I think the best option would be for SpaceX to start using Raptor and start reselling their older Merlin design to other companies. In the short term Orbital should just increase the inspections on the AJ-26 engines prior to using them. It is not like you can’t test for cracks in an engine with X-rays and things like that.
What may also happen is that they start using the Air Force funded LOX/Kerosene engine Lockheed Martin has been asking for to replace the RD-180. Or they could license produce the RD-171, which I think is still built in the Ukraine, or something like that.
I found this quote on Wikipedia in the RD-170 page:
In late 2014, the Russian news agency TASS reported that Orbital Sciences has preliminarily selected the RD-193 as the new engine to power the rocket that Orbital intends to use in its contract proposal to NASA for the second phase of the commercial resupply services to the ISS. The current engine used in the initial version of the Antares launch vehicle first stage is an Aerojet AJ-26, which is a remanufactured Russian NK-33.
If SpaceX is going to move to the Raptor, they will have to bring a new launch vehicle with it. It precludes reusability with the Falcon IX and would require insulated tankage. Essentially, a new vehicle.
He’s under a gag order internally or he’d be out the door.
Meanwhile, VG continues intoning that “this is not a time for speculation.”
In both cases they’re doing a Kabuki dance to try to tamp down negative thoughts. Well, formalistically, fine, but they shouldn’t expect much effect in reality. Better to have multitudes of speculations on the web than be locked into the old “three network and newspapers” era when the likely result would’ve been only the idiocy about slapping down that bothersome commercial space intruder.
As an engineer, there is usually a lot of speculation right after a flight failure. It is never a good time to go out talking to the press about things they may or may not really know. It might take a month or two, just to dig through the telemetry and figure out what happened, let alone why. Only then should they be talking about what to fix.
Anyone ever read “Airframe” by Michael Crichton? Here in the People’s Republic, there is a fashion for homeowners to put up this private lending libraries on their front lawn, and most of what they contain is people sharing their paperback pulp novels and Liberal-Granola Eating-Silly Person’s self help books. Crichton’s novels are maybe a touch more refined, not much more, but maybe a little. Besides, this one was his take on “the aviation industry” that I know a little bit about — I know very little about gene splicing so I cannot tell how much of Jurassic Park and Lost World is real and what simply came out the ol’ aft-facing rocket nozzle.
The hero in this yarn is a single-by-divorce, attractive (after Tom Harkin, are we allowed to say this?), physically fit mom who works as a corporate executive for the fictitious Norton Aircraft, probably a composite of Northrup and Lockheed, whose duty as a corporate flack to explain away a fatal accident is forced upon her, who doesn’t shirk from threats whether from union “goons” whose union feels threatened by what they don’t understand, or from tangling with the real villians, and who has to appear on TV as a corporate spokesperson all bruised and battered, and has to take the patronizing remarks of the TV makeup lady conducting “an intervention” that our hero is the victim of domestic violence.
Since you all know more aviation tech than me, you might find this work a bigger groaner than I did, but it has a political/polemical slant that let’s say will not offend the Libertarians around here. Speaking from my own experiences, this book does a great job explaining the tightrope a corporate spokesperson has to walk and how a Mom would not recognize her own children when they are filtered through the Media.
Rand, a person should read Crichton’s book on why these corporate spokespeople are not candid with you.
I know why they’re not candid with me without reading Crichton’s book.
And the reason they are not candid with you is not that they cannot trust you, which given your skills, knowledge, and personal integrity is definitely not the case. It is that if they say something to you right now without a Non-Disclosure Agreement, they have said it to everybody, which means they have disclosed it to the Media, whose members are much less skilled and knowledgable and whose members are known to put an Agenda ahead of personal integrity?
Michael Crichton’s polemic is that not only is the Media adversarial and Agenda-driven, a person within a company has to be extremely careful with any public pronouncements because of possible agenda-driven factions within that company.
The knock on Wisconsin Governor Candidate Mary Burke that she cannot manage her way out of a wet paper bag may indeed be true, and if it keeps her out of the Governor’s Mansion, the great State of WIsconsin may have dodged a bullet in not only not electing a liberal to unroll sensible reforms but in not electing someone who would be a first-class disaster, and that the Democrats chose a “stealth candidate” without much prior political baggage but someone who was supposed to be a very successful business person is maybe one of those things Democrats do instead of putting forth, say, Kathleen Falk who is very ideological but would be competent?
But the manner in which this most Octobery of October Surprises played out speaks not only to the Media as a filter but of the internal politics, even within a closely held company making bikes let alone rockets?
Slashdot is offerin’ up some speculatin’ (on Spaceship 2, not Antares)
http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/11/03/1257209/spaceshiptwos-rocket-engine-did-not-cause-fatal-crash
with claims that the Spaceship 2 wreckage shows no visible signs of an (oxidizer) tank breach or of an engine explosion or burn-through. The speculation is on a “wrong” deployment of the “shuttlecock” reentry configuration.
The more I speculate on this, the more the Michael Crichton novel seems prescient.
As you linked to in a tweet, Rand, Orbital is saying the evidence is pointing to a turbopump failure in one of the AJ-26s. They’ll be moving to a different engine, target 2016, and will buy 1 or 2 launches on other rockets for Cygnus before then.