Another Rocket Loss Jolts NASA : Delta Carrying Satellite Destroyed After Failure

In a third stunning blow to the nation’s space program, an unmanned Delta rocket carrying a $57.5-million weather satellite went out of control and was destroyed Saturday after its main engine mysteriously shut down 71 seconds after liftoff at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials were shocked and perplexed by the rocket’s failure, which followed on the heels of the Jan. 28 space shuttle Challenger accident and the April 18 explosion of an unmanned Titan 34D rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

William A. Russell, NASA’s Delta project manager, said the launching from Launch Pad A appeared normal until the shutdown of the main liquid-fueled engine, built by the Rocketdyne division of Rockwell International, in Canoga Park, Calif.

“It was a very sharp shutdown, almost as if it were a commanded shutdown,” Russell said at a news conference after the accident.

The vehicle then began to break up under aerodynamic stress as it went out of control with three of its nine strap-on solid-fuel boosters still burning.

About 20 seconds after the main engine failure, Russell said, the Air Force range safety officer sent a destruct signal “to finish the job,” and the rocket exploded in a ball of flame.

NASA officials said they had no immediate clue as to the cause of the accident--the first for the Delta rocket since 1977. But they said the engine failure did not appear to be related to a leaking valve that had postponed the launching Thursday.

NASA had been banking heavily on a successful launching of the 116-foot, blue-and-white Delta rocket--the workhorse of the space agency’s rocket fleet--to regain a measure of the esteem it had lost with the fiery explosion of the Challenger and the loss of its seven crew members.

The McDonnell Douglas-built rockets had gone through an unbroken string of 43 successful launches. Before Saturday there had been a total of 177 Delta launches since the first one in 1960, with only 11 failures, a success rate of 94%.

“Obviously, we’re pretty upset,” said Charles Gay, director for the ill-fated Delta launching. “We had a good one going there. I don’t have any idea what happened.”

The Delta’s destruction was also a setback to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which owned the weather satellite aboard the rocket and had paid $42 million for the launching.

The 998-pound satellite, especially useful for hurricane monitoring, was to replace one that had quit operating two years ago. Now, hurricane forecasters expect to be handicapped in the 1986 season, which begins June 1.

The next scheduled launching of a weather satellite had been set for Oct. 9, also aboard a Delta from the same launch pad at the Air Force station here.

Picture-Perfect Launch

Saturday’s doomed launching began with a picture-perfect liftoff as the rocket arced into the air from the launch pad in a thunderous roar of fire and smoke under a bright blue sky, with temperatures in the high 70s.

A minute after liftoff, six of the nine booster rockets were expended and the three others kicked on. It was shortly after that that the rocket appeared to lose power, about 49 miles downrange and 11 miles high over the Atlantic Ocean.

Russell said the nose cone appeared to snap off under severe stress eight to 10 seconds after the main engine failure. “Oh, no,” said voices coming from the command center over the public address center at the press site, about one mile from the launch pad.

“We have a loss of the vehicle,” NASA launch commentator Lisa Malone said over the speaker system. “We did have a main engine shutdown. We don’t have a cause at this point of what happened.”

NASA officials and reporters at the press site looked aghast as the rocket appeared to break up and two big pieces came down in smoky contrails.

“Incredible,” NASA spokesman James Ball muttered aloud as he shook his head in disbelief. “We sure didn’t need to see that again.”

Another NASA spokesman, Hugh Harris, called it “a sad occasion.”

In Tokyo, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said that President Reagan was informed of the accident by Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan.

Speakes said Rear Adm. Richard H. Truly, associate administrator of NASA for spaceflight, was assembling a special investigating team that would be in operation within 24 hours.

Speakes said the White House also has been in touch with William P. Rogers, head of the commission investigating the Challenger explosion. Rogers said that the Delta accident would not be added to his investigation and that a report on his commission’s inquiry would not be delayed.

“There will be a very detailed and thorough data evaluation,” Gay said. “We’ll know what caused this thing.”

He said all flight data has been impounded and put under lock and key.

He added that there had been no flight hardware problems or anything else “that would have made us suspect anything.”

“We got down to T-zero with no problem and had a normal liftoff,” he said.

Impact to Be Assessed

He also said it was “a little too early to say” whether the Delta accident would have any effect on the next scheduled launching at Cape Canaveral--an Atlas-Centaur rocket with a military communications satellite aboard that has been set for May 22.

The Delta rocket underwent exhaustive review and testing before launching, including a flight-readiness review April 18 at NASA headquarters in Washington.

Officials said the session was held because of a breakdown in communications among shuttle managers before Challenger’s launch, which prevented concerns about the effects of freezing temperatures being passed on to launch officials.