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October 30, 2014

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Probe launched into US rocket blast

THE company behind the dramatic launch explosion of a space station supply mission promises to find the cause of the failure and is warning residents to avoid any potentially hazardous wreckage.

Orbital Sciences Corp’s unmanned Antares rocket blew up just moments after liftoff on Tuesday evening from the Virginia coast.

Meanwhile, early yesterday, the Russian Space Agency launched its own cargo vessel from Kazakhstan and the spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station six hours later with 3 tons of food. The flight was in stark contrast to the Orbital Sciences’ failed launch and had been planned well in advance of the accident.

The Orbital Sciences rocket was carrying a Cygnus capsule loaded with 2.3 tons of experiments and equipment for NASA. No one was injured when it exploded, shooting flaming debris down onto the launch area and into the ocean.

Ground crews were ready to access the fire-stricken area of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility at daybreak yesterday to search for accident debris.

As well as the experiments and equipment, the capsule was carrying prepackaged meals and, in a generous touch, freeze-dried Maryland crab cakes for a Baltimore-born astronaut who’s been in orbit for five months.

All of the lost materials will be replaced and flown to the 420-kilometer-high space station, NASA’s station program manager Mike Suffredini said. The six-person space station crew has enough supplies to last well into spring.

The accident is sure to draw scrutiny to the space agency’s growing reliance on private firms in the post-shuttle era. NASA is paying billions of dollars to Virginia-based Orbital Sciences and the California-based SpaceX company to make station deliveries, and it’s counting on SpaceX and Boeing to start flying astronauts to the orbiting lab as early as 2017.

Until Tuesday, all of the supply missions by Orbital Sciences and SpaceX had been near-flawless.

President Barack Obama has long championed the commercial space effort. He was in Wisconsin for a campaign rally and was kept informed.

Orbital Sciences’ executive vice president Frank Culbertson said the company was insured for the mission. The blast, however, hit the firm’s stock, which fell more than 15 percent.

John Logsdon, former space policy director at George Washington University, said the explosion was unlikely to be a major setback to NASA’s commercial space plans. But he said it could derail Orbital Sciences for a while given it has just one launch pad and the accident occurred right above it.

At a news conference on Tuesday night, Culbertson said everyone at the launch site had been accounted for and the damage appeared to be limited to the facilities.

The cargo module was carrying hazardous materials and residents should avoid any contact with the debris, he said.

Things began to go wrong 10 to 12 seconds into the flight and it was all over in 20 seconds when what was left of the rocket came crashing down, Culbertson said.

This was the second launch attempt for the mission. An attempt on Monday evening was thwarted by a stray sailboat in the rocket’s danger zone.

Culbertson said the top priority will be repairing the launch pad “as quickly and safely as possible.”

“We will not fly until we understand the root cause,” he said, adding that it was too early to guess how long it might take to make the rocket repairs and fix the launch pad.

Culbertson said also it was too soon to know whether the Russian-built engines, modified for the Antares, were to blame.

“We will understand what happened and we’ll get things back on track,” he said.

“We’ve all seen this happen in our business before, and we’ve all seen the teams recover.”

Michelle Murphy, an innkeeper at the Garden and Sea Inn, New Church, Virginia, where launches are visible across a bay, saw the explosion.

“It was scary. Everything rattled,” she said.

“There were two explosions. The first one we were ready for, the second one we weren’t. It shook the inn, like an earthquake.”




 

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