In April the agency stopped payments on a Taurus XL launch vehicle contract with Orbital Sciences for a February 2013 re-flight of the OCO satellite, dubbed OCO 2.
FWIW, I strongly recommend a no-payload dry run of the post-modification vehicle this time.
Quote from: Jose on 05/17/2011 08:08 pmBad news, this.Isn't it good news that they're keeping Taurus as an option?
Bad news, this.
It looks like NASA agrees with you:http://spacenews.com/civil/110516-nasa-add-delta2-list-launchers.htmlQuoteMichael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Sciences Division, said NASA has lost nearly $700 million in Earth science payloads to Taurus XL over the past two years. In a May 11 interview Freilich said he would like to see the rocket fly successfully before putting another Earth-monitoring probe atop it.“I would go more than recertified, personally,” he told Space News. “I would go demonstrated.”Absent a demo flight, “I don’t know what anybody would say about how [we] were good stewards of the taxpayer money if we had a third consecutive launch vehicle failure; $693 million-worth of payload has gone down between the two,” Freilich said...Bad news, this.
Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Sciences Division, said NASA has lost nearly $700 million in Earth science payloads to Taurus XL over the past two years. In a May 11 interview Freilich said he would like to see the rocket fly successfully before putting another Earth-monitoring probe atop it.“I would go more than recertified, personally,” he told Space News. “I would go demonstrated.”Absent a demo flight, “I don’t know what anybody would say about how [we] were good stewards of the taxpayer money if we had a third consecutive launch vehicle failure; $693 million-worth of payload has gone down between the two,” Freilich said...
This whole affair has made me really unhappy with Orbital as a company. Thats two failures because of the same thing. In a row. At least spacex's early pains were separate issues but Orbital has been around for quite some time. I just hope the COTS rocket they are developing does not experience the same kinds of issues. Frankly have alot more faith in Spacex at this point.
Quote from: FinalFrontier on 05/18/2011 12:40 amThis whole affair has made me really unhappy with Orbital as a company. Thats two failures because of the same thing. In a row. At least spacex's early pains were separate issues but Orbital has been around for quite some time. I just hope the COTS rocket they are developing does not experience the same kinds of issues. Frankly have alot more faith in Spacex at this point. HAHA....That's too funny.I actually put more faith in Orbital. This situation is the business: these things can (and have) happened. That's life, you fix it, and move on. As long as a company can weather these times, it only makes them stronger in the long run.
For all of the second guessers out there, it's not like a test flight wasn't considered after T8/OCO. The highest levels of NASA weighed the additional cost and schedule needed to do it and decided the cost-benefit wasn't there. Obviously they were wrong, but risk management is what every executive team does. Hindsight is always 20-20. I'm not sure how the calculus is different because it's happened twice. It's a dictum of Decision Analysis that sunk costs do not enter into the cost-benefit calculation. To do otherwise is not rational.
There were/are separate NASA and Orbital investigation boards for both of these failures, as well as many NASA and Orbital return to flight executive review meetings where both sides bought into the cause and corrective action. It's not proper to leave NASA out of the blame process (cf. "Orbital did not have enough data after the first one," and "how likely you think Orbital is right when they say"). NASA was wrong too.
Is there any way of testing a moving fairing without having to blast it into space?Could a cheaper rocket, such as a sounding rocket, be used?