WASHINGTON — For the second time in two years, a rocket glitch sent a NASA global warming satellite, carrying Colorado-built equipment worth $31 million, to the bottom of the sea Friday.
The $424 million debacle couldn’t have come at a worse time for the space agency and its efforts to understand climate change.
Years of belt-tightening have left NASA’s Earth-watching system in sorry shape, according to many scientists. Any money for new environmental satellites will have to survive budget-cutting, global warming politics and, now, doubts on Capitol Hill about the space agency’s competence.
The Taurus XL rocket carrying NASA’s Glory satellite lifted from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and plummeted to the southern Pacific several minutes later.
The satellite was carrying cameras built by Colorado- based Ball Aerospace & Technologies to photograph clouds. It also contained an instrument built by a University of Colorado lab to measure fluctuations in the sun’s output.
The same thing happened to another climate-monitoring probe in 2009 with the same type of rocket, and engineers thought they had fixed the problem.
“It’s more than embarrassing,” said Syracuse University public policy professor Henry Lambright. “Something was missed in the first investigation and the work that went on afterward.”
Lambright warned that the back-to-back fiascoes could have political repercussions, giving Republicans and climate- change skeptics more ammunition to question whether “this is a good way to spend taxpayers’ money for rockets to fail and for a purpose they find suspect.”
NASA’s environmental division is getting used to failure, cuts and criticism. In 2007, a National Academies of Science panel said that research and purchasing for NASA Earth sciences had decreased 30 percent in six years and that the climate-monitoring system was at “risk of collapse.” Then, last month, the Obama administration canceled two major satellite proposals to save money.
Also, the Republican-controlled House has sliced $600 million from NASA in its continuing spending bill.
A NASA investigation board and Taurus’ builder, Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., will try to figure out what wrong with the launch Friday. It was the third failure out of nine launches for that rocket. NASA paid Orbital $54 million for launching Glory. The last failure was traced to the system that jettisons the covering, and Orbital changed its design.
