TIM FURNISS
Orbital Sciences (OSC) has announced at Le Bourget that its Taurus rocket has been selected by China¹s National Space Program Office (NSPO) to launch the Rocsat-2 remote sensing satellite. Rocsat, built by the European Astrium space company and scheduled for launch in 2003, is to observe and monitor the terrestrial and marine environment and natural resources throughout Taiwan, its remote islands and surrounding ocean for civil applications.
Contract
"The contract demonstrates that the international space community continues to embrace Orbital¹s family of reliable space launch vehicles," says Ron Grabe, former Shuttle astronaut and executive vice-president and general manager of Orbital¹s Launch Systems Group. The Taurus rocket is a four-stage, ground-launched vehicle derived from the company's Pegasus air-launched satellite booster. Since its debut in 1994, Taurus has flown five successful missions.
For the Rocsat 2 mission, OSC will provide the higher-performance XL version of the Taurus rocket. The Taurus XL incorporates the first and second stages of the Pegasus XL vehicle as compared with the original Taurus configuration, which incorporates the first and second stages of a standard Pegasus rocket.
Cause
Meanwhile, the launch failure of a modified OSC Pegasus XL booster carrying NASA's first X-43A scramjet demonstration vehicle on 2 June may have been caused by negligence during the stage's assembly at NASA's Dryden flight research centre, suggests the Sat-ND space monitoring company. The unidentified source quoted by the e-newsletter says that the assembly team may have forgotten to fix the pins to lock the vehicle¹s control fins which fell off as the booster was air-launched.
Source: Flight Daily News
