The Ukrainian area company isn’t too proud of the outcomes of an investigation into the Vega-C rocket anomaly, which blamed a defective half made in Ukraine for the mission failure.
In a assertion issued on Monday, the State House Company of Ukraine condemned a latest failure report, arguing that “the introduced conclusions stay to be untimely and should require additional investigation to establish if there could possibly be further elements that led to the failure of Vega C LV launch,” the area company wrote.
On Friday, the European House Company (ESA) introduced the outcomes of a months-long investigation into the launch failure of its Vega-C rocket in December 2022. The rocket’s second stage, known as the Zefiro 40, suffered a lower in stress and the mission was terminated about 2 minutes and 27 seconds after launch.
An Impartial Enquiry Fee decided that the throat insert, a element of Zefiro 40’s nozzle, was overly eroded, main to the drop in stress. Avio, the Italian firm that constructed Vega-C, has since determined that it’s going to now not use that sort of throat insert, which was produced by Ukrainian firm Yuzhnoye, for future fashions of the rocket. The Fee confirmed that “the trigger was an sudden thermo-mechanical over-erosion of the carbon-carbon (C-C) throat insert of the nozzle, procured by Avio in Ukraine.”
Nevertheless, the Ukrainian authorities isn’t satisfied with the outcomes of the investigation. “The Assertion which relies on the conclusions of the Impartial Enquiry Fee sadly leaves no grounds for additional discussions and casts a shadow over the fame of the area trade of Ukraine,” Ukraine’s area company wrote in its assertion. The area company additionally added that the elements delivered to the Vega-C rocket “have been fully compliant with the necessities imposed.”
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“Ukrainian specialists who participated in a certain part of investigation which they were granted access to, provided their considerations and suggestions that objectively did not find reflection in the conclusions of the Independent Enquiry Commission,” the statement added.
Conditions in Ukraine have been steadily deteriorating since 2014, when Russia first invaded the country. And now, with the ongoing war with Russia in the east, it’s far worse. Ukraine’s space agency may or may not have provided a substandard component to Avio, and it’s likely we’ll never know. That said, it takes a village to both test and launch a rocket, and it would’ve been refreshing to see the blame get spread around, instead of it being pinned to a single provider.
Indeed, ESA and the European space industry as a whole are now laser-focused on getting the Vega-C rocket back in the air and delivering payloads to space. It seems unlikely that ESA and its partners will honor Ukraine’s request to re-open the investigation, as they look to leave the failed launch behind them.
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