/sci/ - Science & Math

>>6451319
They had it figured out for Energia-Buran.

Besides, the N1 launch failures were because of drastic corner cutting, rushing to catch up with the Saturn V program (which had started years earlier), and a Russian engineering philosophy of testing rocket components by flying them.

The first N1 test launch came *after* Saturn V had already put men in orbit around the moon, and only months before Saturn V put a man on the moon. They were in a huge rush.

The N1 program was cancelled after the Saturn V was. They had worked most of the bugs out of the system at this point, but there was little will to continue with a moonshot program trailing far behind the Americans.

Furthermore, when N1 was new, huge rockets lofting huge nuclear bombs were seen as relevant. When it was cancelled, moderately-sized rockets launching MIRV swarms of small, efficient bombs were recognized to be superior.

The mothballed final-version NK-33 engines from the N1 program have proven themselves on Orbital's Antares launch vehicle.

Oh god, this isn't nominal.

This isn't nominal at all.

Anyone else worried that Cygnus is going to ogg the ISS?

The rendezvous is being delayed for days because of a software failure, but even with proven buggy software, they're still going to try and dock it.

There's a guy on /. saying this:
>I worked on this program a few years ago. This doesn't shock me at all. It was a clusterfuck from beginning to end. OSC managers had no clue how to do software development on this kind of program. OSC is mostly a testament to value of lobbying over competence. This is also in line with how things have gone with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory [wikipedia.org] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(satellite) [wikipedia.org] Here is the really good one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DART_(satellite) [wikipedia.org] Orbital science crashed two satellites trying something almost identical in 2005!

But Antares is "just another rocket". Orbital's a mediocre launch company, an old defense contractor and satellite specialist that gets trotted out as "proof" that there's some kind of free market operating. "Private" or not (and don't let anyone tell you Orbital isn't deeply entangled with government), definitely OldSpace, with no real prospects for making any dramatic advance.

Antares's first stage uses refurbished surplus Soviet engines. They're not supporting anything interesting by doing that. It's a shortsighted way to do a few launches, which aren't terribly cheap or reliable.

>>6026652
>Orbital Sciences

He seems to have gotten his vocab under control.