Assembly Problem Suspected in Delta Rocket Failure

Officials investigating last month’s crash of a Delta rocket said Thursday they believe the failure was the result of a hardware assembly problem, but sabotage of an internal system is not being ruled out.

“We’re probably looking for a fault in the engine compartment section,” Lawrence Ross, chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Delta Review Board, told a House panel. “Somehow our prelaunch procedures . . . were not capable of detecting this latent flaw.”

Ross said the review board had not discounted sabotage in the May 3 rocket failure at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., in which the Delta’s first-stage engine quit abruptly 71 seconds after launching. Ground controllers destroyed the rocket with a radio signal, causing the loss of a $57.5-million weather satellite.

Short Circuit Suspected

Investigators believe the engine failure was caused by a short circuit, but have not pinned down the cause of the electrical problem other than to say a hardware flaw was the likely culprit.

Even so, many of the questions posed by members of the House Science and Technology space subcommittee centered on the possibility of sabotage.

“You can imagine the kind of questions we’re getting from other congressmen,” Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), chairman of the House Science and Technology space subcommittee, said. “After this many failures, you can’t help but question whether there is some sinister force that has snake-bit the whole system.”

Ross dismissed the possibility of external sabotage--an outside radio signal interfering with the Delta’s electrical system--as unfeasible. If sabotage occurred, he said, it would have had to involve an internal system.