The Reds' rocket's glare

I'm old enough to remember each stage of mankind's space exploration -- Sputnik 1, Leika and Belka, Telstar, Yuri Gagarin, Alan Sheppard, Mercury/Gemini/Apollo, the ISS and so on.  Like a lot of people of my age, I get a bit sad when I contemplate the fact that the great age of space exploration ended more than three decades ago, when the Apollo moon voyages stopped. At a time of cold war tension, the space race was a very healthy and beneficial competition between the superpowers.  Today's efforts seem picayune in comparison.

Still, I hadn't realised just how bad things had become until I saw the accounts of the NASA-sponsored rocket launch that went badly wrong just seconds after blast-off in Virginia earlier this week.  Strapped for cash, NASA has been privatizing its efforts, so the ill-fated launch was in fact being carried out by a sub-contractor called Orbital Sciences. And as Wolf Blitzer told the world the day after the explosion, the rocket they were trying to use was a forty-year old one from the former USSR!  In fact, it was of a type that the folks at Baikonur (that was the USSR's Cape Canaveral) had experienced all sorts of launchpad problems with all those years ago --  so many problems that the rockets were deemed unserviceable, and were ordered to be scrapped. For whatever reason, this didn't happen, and so these many years later Orbital Science pitched up, bought them and offered them to NASA.

Wolf Blitzer didn't seem bothered by this startling revelation.  In fact, he almost saw it as a plus -- blame the Russkies!  After all, he pointed out, there aren't a lot of US-made rockets out there that NASA and its sub-contractors could buy instead.  Really?  The US military doesn't seem to be suffering from a shortage of rockets, and it seems unlikely in the extreme that they're procuring theirs from Russia, China or anywhere else.  Back in the heyday of the space program, there was an enormous amount of cross-fertilization between NASA and the military.  Whether for financial or security reasons, it appears this is no longer the case.

Blitzer and his expert panelists agreed that this week's setback will not stop NASA's outsourcing efforts, because it's so much cheaper than doing everything for itself. It's not clear how you make that calculation when NASA's entire payload was incinerated less than 100 feet above the launch pad, on the very same day that a Russian supply ship to the ISS made an uneventful trip.  But if he's right, then anyone with a stash of the UK's old Blue Steel and Blue Streak rockets, which never seemed to get higher than the launch gantry without exploding, might finally be able to cash in.