美国上一枚新型中型运载火箭——由轨道科学公司开发的“天鹅座”运载火箭——首飞已过去13年。
It has been 13 years since the debut of a new medium-lift rocket in the United States, the Antares vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation.
“天鹅座”运载火箭初始的100系列版本可谓一团糟。该火箭使用的是苏联旧式发动机，制造于阿波罗宇航员登月时代。几十年后，即1990年代，艾尔捷特公司收购了这些发动机并对其进行翻新，用于2010年代发射的火箭。不出所料，2014年“天鹅座”运载火箭第五次发射时发生爆炸。
The initial 100-series variant of the Antares rocket was kind of a hot mess. The rocket used old Soviet engines built during the era when Apollo astronauts were landing on the Moon. Decades later, in the 1990s, Aerojet acquired the engines and refurbished them for a rocket that would launch in the 2010s. Predictably, on the fifth launch of an Antares rocket in 2014, it exploded.
“天鹅座”运载火箭是美国濒临灭绝的中型运载火箭——定义为运载能力为2至20公吨——的最后一款。近十年半之后，新一代中型运载火箭即将投入使用，它们与“天鹅座”截然不同，后者不仅使用俄罗斯发动机，其核心级还在乌克兰制造。
The Antares vehicle is the last of a dying breed of medium-lift rockets—defined as having a lift capacity of 2 to 20 metric tons—in the United States. Nearly a decade and a half later there is a new generation of medium-lift vehicles coming online, and they are starkly different from Antares, which had not just Russian engines but a core stage manufactured in Ukraine.