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Antares rocket explosion shows why it's hard to do science in space: Bob McDonald

Many scientists, engineers and students watched years of effort crash to the ground this week, as the Antares Rocked plunged to the ground, six seconds after launch. It shows that doing science in space is difficult, time-consuming and sometimes frustrating.

The students in Kamloops, B.C. who watched their crystal growth experiment go up in flames had spent a year proposing it to NASA, developing it and getting it on board the spacecraft. Theirs was one of dozens of other science experiments on board the doomed rocket, including 26 mini-satellites – called cubesats – that were to be released from the space station as a low-cost way of monitoring the Earth's environment.

Now, everyone will have to wait months or years for the opportunity to fly again.

Space is a unique environment to do science, because it is the only place where the effects of gravity can be removed for long periods of time. In microgravity, crystals grow larger and more pure, flames take on a different shape, plants will grow in any direction. Then, of course, there are all the changes taking place in the human body. But if you want to study those phenomena in space, first you have to design an experiment; then you have to get it up there.

And that's the catch.

Not like an earthbound lab

Most scientists do experiments in laboratories, where equipment is cobbled together using whatever works – often times, supplies from the local hardware store. The apparatus can be set up to run over- night, and if the experiment was a failure, it can be run again with modifications the next day. And if that fails, which is the norm, they can run it again and again until either the desired result is achieved, or start over again with something different.

But to run an experiment in space, the equipment has to meet stringent space flight standards, which really means it has to be tough enough to survive the rigours of launch. Rockets produce strong forces and powerful vibrations during blast off, so your experiment must be strong enough to survive that and still function.

Then, once it gets to space, astronauts are usually so busy they don't have time to do much more than turn it on and make sure it's running, which means your experiment has to run itself. It can take years to design even a simple experiment for space flight.

After all that, if your space experiment fails, it may be years before it can be run again, if ever.

That's why rocket explosions or probes that crash on other planets are so devastating to everyone who spent years designing and building these off-Earth experiments. It's particularly hard for young people, who may have based their PhD or future career on the results.

Recycled rocket engines

The sad part of the Antares explosion is that the rocket engines it used are modified leftovers from a 1960s Russian moon rocket. During the heady days of the U.S. vs. Soviet race to the moon, when money was no object, the Soviets built a gigantic rocket called the N-1 to rival the huge Saturn 5 that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon. Unfortunately, the N-1 exploded every time it flew. Then the Americans reached the moon first, so the program was canceled, leaving a warehouse full of very large, unused rocket engines.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, those engines were made available for sale at relatively low cost. The Americans jumped at the opportunity to scoop up cheap, ready-made rocket engines for use by their military. Those engines have proven to be remarkably reliable, although not without incident.

Russian engineers claim this latest failure of the Antares was not because of their engines. But in light of recent tensions between the two countries over Crimea, two American private companies, United Launch Alliance and Blue Origins (funded partly by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos) are developing a new replacement for the Russian engines called the BE-4.

But that engine will not be ready for flight until 2017.

Undoubtedly, even with new engines, there will be rocket failures in the future. You would think that after more than 50 years of spaceflight, we would have figured out how to do it. But leaving the Earth still pushes our technology to its absolute limit, and sometimes beyond.

Until we find a better way of getting off the planet than the current method of sitting on top of the world's largest firecrackers, scientists will have to be willing to invest years of work for a few minutes of riding a flame to space and hoping it doesn't explode.