Space / Launch plans delayed as rocket firm shares footage from test incident
THE ROCKET company involved in the recent fire incident at SaxaVord Spaceport says it will back on the launchpad “relatively quickly”.
But Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) has confirmed that its plans to undertake a launch from Unst will be delayed.
The German company has also now issued video footage from Monday’ night’s dramatic failed “hot fire” test and explained what went wrong.
A representative for the firm said the plan was to ignite all nine rocket engines for the first time.
Eight ignited but one had a “very unusual anomaly” which RFA believes was a fire in an oxygen pump.
The flames then spread to the other engines, with kerosene effectively fuelling the fire.
RFA said at a later point the fire turned into an “oxygen fire”. The entire stage – the rocket equipment being tested – collapsed.
The company also said the fire suppression systems were “were not adequately sized to deal with this kind of damage”.
The representative said: “This comes at a really critical time – we wanted to launch within the next few weeks and months, and this is unfortunately no longer possible.”
The launch site infrastructure is said to be largely fine, apart from direct supporting system sitting around the engines which will need to be rebuilt.
Having done many tests in the past elsewhere the team said it is confident the incident was not related to the design of its rocket infrastructure.
The one which went up in flames was described as the “engineering model” – with RFA having another build in its possession with more improvements.
There also stands to be improvements to the launch stool’s fire suppression systems.
RFA confirmed that the other parts of the rocket structure are “all ready for flight in SaxaVord”.
There were no injuries in the incident.
He also said it was an accepted fact within the emerging space industry that failures such as Monday’s were inevitable.
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