The Orbital Sciences Corp.’s Antares rocket lifted off to start its third resupply mission to the International Space Station, but suffered a catastrophic anomaly shortly after liftoff at 6:22 p.m. EDT.
The Orbital Sciences team is executing its contingency procedures, securing the site and data, including all telemetry from the Antares launch vehicle and Cygnus spacecraft.
Before launch the Orbital team was not tracking any issues.
No injuries have been reported, and Orbital reports that all personnel around the Wallops Flight Facility launch site have been accounted for.
NASA will continue to provide additional updates as they become available. A news conference will be held on NASA TV at 9 p.m. EDT.
Visit http://1.usa.gov/1r42Ssu for the latest information.
Well dang, man.
On this sad moment for people of Science and Techology, we want to express our solidarity with NASA and all institutions envolved on the project, wishing this ambitious project that must continue as soon as possible, for the benefith of humanity.
FLY HIGH, FLY FAST, FLY FAR.
A “mishap”? It appears to me to be more of a “catastrophic failure”.
NASA sure has a way of downplaying such failures!
I believe the term is high order event…
Mishap / Catastrophic Failure…? Sound just like the U.S. Government the past 6-years!
Our heartfelt thoughts and sympathy go out to the entire Antares team. This is an incredible collaborative effort bringing so many different groups together. We are sorry to hear about today’s mishap. No doubt much will be learned in the aftermath and future missions will be the better for what happened today.
That’s not buffing-out… Fix, and do it again.
We should start making our own rocket engines. Russian liquid-fuel ones are supposed to be good, but they are Russian. I wonder if they are or can possibly be tested prior to launch. If they are, they are probably not tested to the full capacity.
To me, a non-specialist, this seemed to be a failure of the engines.