10-17-2016, 05:52 PM
(10-17-2016, 05:39 PM)SCN-3_NULL Wrote:(10-17-2016, 05:35 PM)OdinYggd Wrote: Orbital is launching their Antares OR-5 rocket tonight from Wallops Virginia.Soviet engines > capitalist engine
Last time Antares was supposed to fly, it exploded just after launch due to an engine failure.
The OR-5 uses different engines, RD180s, instead of the NK-33 engines that had originally been built for the Russian moon landing program.
Maybe not.
The soviet-built NK33 engines were developed originally as part of the N-1 moon mission. After the N1 exploded and the project cancelled, the politicians ordered the engines to be scrapped. Instead they were forgotten in a warehouse.
Some decades later, skeptical engineers discovered this warehouse and the surviving NK-33 engines. Bringing them to the states, they were refurbished by Aerojet and the controls replaced to create the AeroJet AJ-26 engine, which retained the fuel efficiency of the NK-33 while offering slightly higher performance. But they were still based on that same flawed design.
Antares attempted to use them, and on its second mission the AJ-26 engines exploded likely due to the same design flaw that had caused the N1 explosion, so Orbital grounded the Antares design in order to redesign it using a different engine.
This flight is then testing the results of that effort, with the RD-180 engines being from a totally different line of development and already in regular use on other craft.
Feel free to PM me if anything is broken