Orbital Sciences Releases Revised ISS Cargo Delivery Plans In Wake Of Antares Explosion

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

As the investigation into last week’s failure of the Orbital Sciences Antares rocket continued on Wednesday, the Dulles, Virginia-based firm announced revised plans to complete cargo deliveries to the ISS under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS).

According to Orbital, the new approach will allow all remaining cargo scheduled for delivery to the space station under its existing CRS contact to be completed by the end of 2016. There will be no additional cost to NASA, the company said, and only minor adjustments to the cargo manifest will be required in the near future.

The new proposal will require an already planned upgrade of the Antares medium-class launcher’s main propulsion system to be moved forward to 2016, the company said. The failed rocket, which exploded shortly after launch on October 28, was using two four-decade old, Soviet-built AJ-26 engines at the time of the incident.

Prior to the propulsion system upgrade, which Orbital said will take place sometime in 2016, the company said that at least one and possibly two non-Antares launches of the company’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the ISS would take place over the next two years. Those launches will accommodate heavier cargo loads as capacity allows.

“Orbital is taking decisive action to fulfill our commitments to NASA in support of safe and productive operations of the Space Station,” explained Orbital chairman and CEO David W. Thompson. “While last week’s Antares failure was very disappointing to all of us, the company is already implementing a contingency plan to overcome this setback.”

“We intend to move forward safely but also expeditiously to put our CRS cargo program back on track and to accelerate the introduction of our upgraded Antares rocket,” he added. In addition, the company said that it expected repairs to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) launch complex at the Wallops Flight Facility to be completed in time for launch operations to continue at the facility with the upgraded Antares beginning in 2016.

Thompson said that the precise financial impact to the company “will depend on which of several specific options for near-term launches is selected, but they are not expected to be material on an annual basis in 2015. In all cases, no significant adverse effects are projected in 2016 or future years, in part because the cost of the Antares propulsion system upgrade was already part of our internal investment plan during that time.”

As for the investigation into last Tuesday’s incident, Orbital said that the Antares launch failure Accident Investigation Board (AIB) was making “good progress” in determining what the cause of the rocket failure was. It noted that preliminary reviews of the video data and telemetry had been completed, and that a substantial amount of debris from both the Antares rocket and its Cygnus cargo ship had already been collected and analyzed.

While the analysis into the incident continued, Orbital said that the preliminary evidence revealed the cause of the explosion was likely related to a turbopump-related failure in one of the two AJ26 engines – hence the decision to discontinue their use moving forward. Thompson had previously noted the company was approximately two years away from conducting a launch using its new second-generation propulsion system.

The October 28 incident resulted in the loss of 1,600 pounds of science and research, including experiments designed by students in the US and Canada and the Planetary Resources ARKYD 3 spacecraft, which is a small test vehicle for future asteroid missions that was to be carried into low Earth orbit. No injuries were reported.

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