Shuttle Launch Delay Blamed on Rocketdyne : Aerospace: NASA says the Canoga Park engine maker failed to properly document its work on a spacecraft pump.
The launch of the space shuttle Endeavor planned for today is being delayed for at least two weeks because the shuttle’s engine builder, Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, failed to correctly document whether one of the engine’s parts was space-worthy, a NASA spokesman said Wednesday.
Endeavor’s liftoff is being pushed back to the June 17-20 period while NASA changes the part in question--a pump on one of Endeavor’s main engines, NASA spokesman Ed Campion said in Washington.
The foul-up, in fact, is one of many problems related to how Rocketdyne documents its work that NASA has discovered during a ongoing review of Rocketdyne’s operations, Campion said.
The review was ordered in March by Tom Utsman, NASA’s shuttle program director, after lapses in Rocketdyne’s paperwork earlier this year prompted NASA to question whether certain components on recently delivered shuttle engines were reliable.
For instance, in late February NASA was examining the engines for another shuttle flight, Columbia, when it found that it could not determine whether certain seals on the engine were old versions of the part or the new seals NASA wanted, Campion said.
“There wasn’t documentation to tell . . . and NASA requires that for everything,” he said.
That forced a monthlong delay in Columbia’s liftoff while NASA removed the engines to determine which seals were being used. The flight was aborted again--only three seconds from launch--on March 22 when an engine valve stuck, but Campion said that snag was unrelated to the documentation problems.
Columbia finally took off April 26.
Rocketdyne, a unit of Seal Beach-based Rockwell International Corp., gets $350 million a year from its shuttle work. The company has been “very cooperative” in correcting the paperwork gaps, Campion said.
Rocketdyne President Robert Paster said in a statement that after reviewing 30,000 pages of shuttle work instructions, “we have identified a number of factory operations improvements to further ensure product integrity and safe flight.”
Campion said the review found “that there were cases where the general engineering drawings and instructions (to Rocketdyne’s assemblers) weren’t as specific as they should have been.
“As a result, the workers were establishing what they thought was the best way to do it,” which contributed to the confusion, he said.
