ATK [ATK] President and CEO Mark DeYoung on Wednesday said his company and its board of directors believe that Orbital Sciences [ORB] has a sound recovery plan for NASA’s cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station following a launch vehicle failure in October and that the financial risks to Orbital going forward are minimal.
Both companies announced on Tuesday that plans for a merger of the two remains on track, although it will be delayed about two months until February 2015.
DeYoung said the company spent two weeks analyzing Orbital’s new plans for Cargo Resupply Services to the Space Station and found that “the successful program execution of Orbital’s recovery plan is likely, the recovery plan risks are manageable, both on Orbital’s assumptions and our own stress test scenarios that we applied to their assumptions.” He also said the financial impact to the CRS program is “minimal.”
Orbital’s overall financial position is sound as well, DeYoung said.
“Information from Orbital demonstrates that their overall earnings and cash flow remain largely intact with minimal impact,” he said.” And, according to Orbital, the customer is positively engaged on the recovery and likely to approve the revised launch schedule in a reasonable period of time.”
Orbital’s Antares rocket blew up during liftoff on Oct. 28. Preliminary findings indicate that the first state Russian-built engine is to blame. The company planned to conduct five more CRS missions with Antares, but now plans to consolidate the number of launches to four using other launch vehicles and complete the effort by the end of 2016.