5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 13one of the PSCA’s buildings and an
insurance agency got involved.
On 29 November, Astra tested
another rocket. In December, an
FAA official told a conference that
this flight had also encountered
a mishap, saying: “Rockets are
complex, powerful vehicles
that fail every now and again...
Even though all five engines
failed, all debris landed in the
spaceport boundary.”
Astra now says that only two
of the engines failed, the rest were
shut down automatically to ensure
the rocket stayed on its planned
trajectory. It confirmed that the
rocket landed on spaceport land.
Mark Lester, Alaska Aerospace’s
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president, confirms that the
spaceport was damaged twice
in 2018, with a total of 232 tonnes
of soil removed for treatment
in Anchorage. Among other
treatments, the soil was heated
to 315°C to vaporise residual
hydrocarbons.
“Normally, these vehicles land
almost empty,” says a commercial
rocket expert, who asked not to
be identified. “But if your thrust
terminated early, you’d fall down
and still have propellant left.”
Lester told New Scientist that
the damage to the spaceport
was superficial. “While we
take every precaution to avoid
environmental impacts, whensuch an incident occurs, we work
diligently with authorities to
ensure proper remediation.”
Sally Brown, a soil scientist at
the University of Washington in
Seattle says that soil contamination
isn’t uncommon at launch sites.
“But this was a very heavy-handed
approach to get rid of the
contaminants,” she says. “Scraping
up that much soil and shipping it
far away can cause more damage
than the contamination itself.”
Brown says bioremediation
using microorganisms and plants
can be a more sensitive way to
handle such incidents. The PSCA
hasn’t responded to queries about
its remediation choices. ❚The Pacific Spaceport
Complex – Alaska is
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