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 The recommendation came in the investigators' report on the
explosion of Orbital ATK's Antares rocket that destroyed a load of
cargo for the space station. It may spur calls for more oversight of
NASA's use of commercial contracts to deliver cargo - and soon crew
members - to the space station.
NASA shared development costs for those programs with its commercial
partners, while earlier rockets were fully government-funded.
Separate accident investigations are underway to determine the cause
of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket failure on June 28, 2015, which claimed
another load of station cargo.
NASA hired both Orbital and privately held Space Exploration
Technologies, or SpaceX, to fly cargo to the station after the space
shuttles were retired. The U.S. space agency is working on a similar
program with SpaceX and Boeing to fly crew.
 Orbital, in a report obtained by Reuters from the Federal Aviation
Administration on Tuesday, said the Oct. 28, 2014 Antares explosion
was most likely caused by an engine manufacturing defect, while NASA
said it could also have been caused by a design issue or debris in
the engine.
Both investigations said a fire and explosion in the rocket engine’s
liquid oxygen turbopump caused the booster to fail about 14 seconds
after liftoff from Wallops Island, Virginia.
Orbital said the cause of the failure was most likely a
manufacturing defect in a turbopump in one of the rocket’s two AJ-26
engines, a Soviet-era motor refurbished and resold by Aerojet
Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.
Aerojet in September paid Orbital $50 million to settle the dispute.
Orbital plans to replace the AJ-26 engines with a new Russian-made
engine manufactured by Russia's NPO Energomash. First flight of the
refurbished Antares is expected in 2016.
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The use of Russian engines is controversial – they have been banned
from use in rockets carrying military payloads – but analyst Marco
Caceres, with Teal Group, says NASA has no choice if they want
competition. “We know the Russians build excellent engines, but we
don’t know how the quality control is,” he said. “To a certain
extent, it’s a moot point because NASA doesn’t have a lot of
choices.” The NASA investigators said a manufacturing defect was
possible in the Antares case, noting that a defect also was found in
a separate AJ-26 engine that exploded during testing in May 2014.
But they said it was not clear the defect alone could have caused
the explosion.
The NASA probe found two other potential causes of the failure: an
engine design that made the turbopump “vulnerable to oxygen fires
and failures,” and silica and titanium debris found in the engine.
The probe said any one of the three potential causes, or a
combination of them, could have triggered the explosion.
Investigators also said Orbital and Aerojet did not have full
insight into the design and operational record of the engines, which
were manufactured 40 years ago for a Soviet moon program.
(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by Andrea Shalal and Andrew Hay)
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