Decades-old Soviet engines powered the US rocket that exploded

From Business Insider

Washington (AFP) – The Orbital Sciences rocket that exploded after launch was powered by a pair of rocket engines that were made during the Soviet era and refurbished, experts said.

The Ukrainian-designed AJ-26 engines date back to the 1960s and 1970s, and Aerojet Rocketdyne of Sacramento, California has a stockpile that it refurbishes for Orbital Sciences.

Orbital described the AJ-26 engine on its web site as “a commercial derivative of the engine that was first developed for the Russian moon rocket that would have taken cosmonauts to the moon.”

In 2010, the company announced it would use the engines for its Taurus II rocket because “it achieves very high performance in a lightweight, compact package.”

The Soviet Union poured $1.3 billion in investment over a 10-year period into developing the engines and building more than 200 of them in all, Orbital said.

Space analyst Marco Caceres of the Teal Group told AFP that the AJ-26 is “a powerful engine” that was designed to launch people to the moon, but never did.

“They did have problems with that engine back in the ’60s and ultimately they stopped manufacturing it,” he said.

In 1993, Aerojet began developing design modifications to make the engine suitable for commercial launches.

The staged-combustion, oxygen kerosene engines underwent testing at NASA’s Stennis facility in Mississippi.

In May, an AJ-26 engine blew up during a ground test there, but in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s accident, officials declined to link the two incidents.

Orbital Sciences has begun investigating the cause of the rocket failure at Wallops Island, Virginia but has not released any conclusions yet.

Orbital engineers said there was no alarming signs leading up to the sunset launch.

The accident was the first catastrophic failure since private companies began supplying the International Space Station in 2010.

– Order to detonate –

The rocket exploded about six seconds after it lifted off from the seaside launch pad Tuesday at 6:22 pm (2222 GMT).

A ground controller at Wallops Island issued a command to destroy the vehicle, Orbital representatives said in a press conference late Tuesday, but gave no details on why.

“It is kind of standard procedure, that if you get something in your readings that indicate it is going to fail, you would detonate it sooner rather than later,” explained Caceres.

“You don’t want that vehicle to fly very high if you know it is going to fail.”

John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, agreed.

“There was something dramatic happening to lead the range safety officer to issue a destruct command,” Logsdon told AFP.

“They know that something was really wrong and they have all the data from the rocket so it should not take long to find out what went wrong.”

It was also the first attempt to launch the Antares 130, a more powerful kind of Antares than the 110 and 120 models that have flown in the past.

“I imagine they will be looking at a lot of issues,” said Caceres, including whether there was too much weight on the rocket, or if there was a fuel leak or a corrosion problem.

IMAGE: afp decades old soviet engines powered us rocket that exploded AFP

People who came to watch the launch of an unmanned rocket owned by Orbital Sciences Corporation look on after it exploded shortly after being launched on October 28, 2014 on Wallops Island, Virginia

For more on this story go to: http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-decades-old-soviet-engines-powered-us-rocket-that-exploded-2014-10#ixzz3HjNzuLrl

Horrifying ‘fish drags kitten into pond’ video has surprise ending

From Examiner

A horrifying video of a fish dragging a kitten into a pond has a happy ending

(For video go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OBZMh-fn1w)

A video of a kitten dragged by a fish into a pond is going viral because it’s a flip on the usual scenario. And, the abrupt end of the clip, punctuated by a woman’s terrified scream, left viewers wondering what happened to the too curious kitty. Happily, in a twist that took a day to unravel, it turns out the lucky cat made a miraculous escape after all. Because that’s what cats do.

A video of a fish dragging a kitten into a pond has a happy ending

The video, posted to YouTube on Oct. 28, shows two kittens by the banks of a man-made pond somewhere in a Japanese city. One of the cats is obviously intrigued by the rather large fish swimming just near the edge. The kitten takes a few swipes at a passing giant goldfish and edges ever closer to the water.

That’s when a bigger fish, possibly a Pike, leaps from the pond and appears to snatch the hapless kitten, dragging it into the deep end. The obviously surprised mobile phone user, catching the incredible scene on video, utters a horrified scream as the clip abruptly ends, with no word on whether the bedraggled cat ever made it out of the water or not.

Naturally, most viewers expressed a mixture of horror and fascination. After all, the old saying, “Curiosity killed the cat” has been, sadly, proven true all too many times. So, most were resigned to assume that the fish army was one up that day on the scoreboard of the ageless battle against their ancient nemesis. Then the story was covered by Opposing Views Magazine, with a different, higher quality version of the video, which was slowed down and magnified to reveal much finer detail.

That’s when a sharp-eyed subscriber noticed, at about the :20 mark in the video, that the kitten, rather than being dragged into the pond, actually made a lightning-fast bolt out of camera range. Only after watching the blurry frames a few times over does it become clear that cats, even as kittens, well deserve their reputation for escaping certain death. In other words, this curious feline still has eight lives left.

It’s not surprising to cat lovers that even a kitten has such fantastic reflexes, so much so that they’re literally faster than a blinking eye. But, in the end, it’s harder to fool the unblinking eye of even the cheapest digital video camera. And, in this case, just a bit of technical wizardry gives this horror story a happy ending. As it turns out, it wasn’t a total loss for the fish either. Just imagine the story that Pike can tell his buddies about the one that got away.

For more on this story go to: http://www.examiner.com/article/horrifying-fish-drags-kitten-into-pond-video-has-surprise-ending