Last night there was some discussion of what Elon Musk must think of Orbitals Antares rocket failure. I thought that he would react with disappointment since he would regret any loss of public faith in spaceflight. However, there is this: Elon Musk, the chief executive of Orbital’s competitor SpaceX, has long warned against using such decades-old technology. Calling it one of the “pretty silly things going on in the market,” he told Wired last year some aerospace firms rely on parts “developed in the 1960s” rather than “better technology.” He called out Orbital Sciences in particular. It “has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke,” he said. “It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s — I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.” So now I bet he is probably feeling a bit of an I told you so moment and his reliability and stature has increased, not gone down.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 21:15:36 +0000
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