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Comment by tomswartz07 | Hacker News Reader

Here's the thing: the rocket itself is not 'decades old'. The design is.

This is tantamount to saying "Oh, cars use a decades old design.. they must be terrible!"

The article also completely overlooks the fact that Russia launched a rocket with the supplies within 24 hours of the failure. http://news.yahoo.com/cause-sought-space-supply-rocket-08252...

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Not exactly. The engines themselves are decades old, Orbital Science is quoted as saying

"'As we went through testing, we did discover there were some effects of aging since they had been in storage for awhile, including some stress corrosion cracking,' Culbertson conceded at the time. 'That’s what we [corrected] with weld repairs and other inspections.'"

They got the engines that were decades old, and they've been fixing problems that they have found, and refurbishing them and installing them into rockets. It doesn't say they have built new engines on the old designs. That would have been better, because then you would have someone who had designed the engine on staff and could understand it in a deep way.

Presumably Orbital is designing their own engines now, or contracting with someone to do so, perhaps their go to market strategy was "Get some things into space with these old surplus engines, use the revenue/time to design/test/manufacture our own engines, and then continue on with our own bespoke design." I don't know of course if that was their intention or not.

Orbital now has ATK experience on board. Feels natural to switch to all-solid rockets - like other Orbital designs. However for now, the Antares is the biggest Orbital rocket, and it's designed with NK-33. Definitely need to investigate this event and make decisions.

It's better to use engines which were just created - or just manufactured - but sometimes there are reasons to prefer old engines to new ones. Age is not the only factor.

The rocket engine is actually decades old. The engines were built many years ago, then stored under a tarp in a Russian facility somewhere. They were supposed to be dismantled, but some Party official risked his neck by sparing them the destruction, hiding them in some forgotten facility - however, the flip side to that was that the engines were stored in probably not the best conditions.

Orbital used them because they were the cheap option.

No, the engine is literally decades old. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33 :

"Nearly thirty years after they were built, disbelieving rocket engineers were led to the warehouse. One of the engines was later taken to America, and the precise specification of the engine was demonstrated on a test stand."

No, in this case part of the rocket itself was decades old. Orbital used AJ-26 engines for the first stage, which are refurbished NK-33 engines originally built for the Soviet moon program. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33

Actually, the engines are. The AJ-26 is a rebuilt NK-33, originally built in the early 1970s.

Downvote. The engines were indeed originally _built_ in the 60s or 70s and have literally been sitting around for the vast majority of the time since.

Second, not sure what your point is with the Russian launch. It uses different engines and was scheduled awhile back.

But cars are... they are extremely inefficient to more modern designs. We just haven't found something better then the internal combustion engine.

Not the rocket, the engines. And yes, they are decades old. The project that produced the NK-33 engines was abandoned i Soviet in 1974, so they are at least 40 years old. Aerojet bought a stockpile of them in the 90's.

The article refers to them as "refurbished Soviet engines" which certainly sounds like Some parts of the engines are original.

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