Miami: The global space industry is reeling after three cargo disasters in less than a year have delivered a costly blow to efforts to supply astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
The explosion of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday also raised new questions about whether US rockets are safe enough to start launching astronauts to space as planned in 2017. “It is unfortunately part of the business. The idea of 100 percent reliability is just not there,” said Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. “I am saddened at what happened today but tomorrow we will bounce back.”
The first in a series of accidents came in October, when Orbital lost its Cygnus cargo carrier due to an apparent flaw in the Ukrainian made engine aboard its Antares rocket, which exploded shortly after liftoff from Virginia. In April, the Russian space agency lost communication with its ISS bound Progress cargo capsule, which burned up on re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere two weeks later. Then, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket exploded just over two minutes into its flight Sunday, with the Dragon cargo ship and its 4,000 pounds (1,800 kilograms) of expensive gear falling to pieces in the Atlantic Ocean near the Florida coast.
“This is a blow to us. We lost a lot of important research equipment on this flight,” said NASA Associate Administrator Bill Gerstenmaier. Crew members living in orbit have plenty of food and supplies to last for the next four months, NASA said, but officials admitted that no amount of planning could have prepared them for three major accidents in a row. “We expected through the commercial cargo program we would lose some vehicles. I didn’t think we would lose them all in a one year time frame,” Gerstenmaier said.
He added that there was no common link to the accidents, and negligence was not an issue. Rather, he said, the problems show just how difficult it is to fly rockets. “We are essentially operating systems at the edge of their ability to perform.”
