Rockets Red Glare?

[BushMasterBoy]

Rocket explodes over Wallops! Was supposed to supply International Space Station...

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/antares-rocket-bound-space-station-explodes-launch-n235996

[RblDiver]

Ouch, sucks....but boy does it look cool :P

[SuperiorDG]

I watched live yesterday before they scrubbed the launch. Was going to watch today's launch but missed it. Damn

[TEAMRICO]

Makes for good internet but I fail to see how that helps us with Muslim Outreach!

[DenverGP]

Cool vid.

Waste of a perfectly good explosion we could have used on some ISIS.

[DHC]

We're so much better off now that Shuttles don't shuttle anything and we're depending on russian tech. How many failures in the last year have been due to russian rockets....

I'd be a... lot leery if I was an astronaut.

This particular failure is from one of the US mid-size companies that have begun threatening (competitively) the likes of Raytheon and Boeing. Orbital Sciences along with Elon Musk's SpaceX have been sending a real scare into some of the large/bloated aerospace firms. I am hopeful this failure will not set them back too far - though it is bound to be a real blow to the company.

FWIW

[mtnrider]

It's Bush's fault

[HoneyBadger]

We're so much better off now that Shuttles don't shuttle anything and we're depending on russian tech. How many failures in the last year have been due to russian rockets....

I'd be a... lot leery if I was an astronaut.
Orbital Sciences is a US company. The Antares rocket has 2 Aerojet AJ26-62 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJ-26) engines. Also not Russian. They are loosely based off an old Soviet engine, if that's what you're referring to, but these are not the problematic RD-180 engines that we've read about in the news recently. With regard to Russian tech, our astronauts (cosmonauts to the Ruskies!) do still fly in the Soyuz system, which has a pretty good success rate.

The payload, while destined for the ISS, was not the usual sustainment cargo that we think of. The payload included a Planetary Resources (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Resources)Arkyd-3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkyd-3) satellite and a NASA JPL/UT-Austin CubeSat mission named RACE.

This is a pretty unusual event and I'm really glad there is good video footage and analytic data streams. We should be able to piece this together fairly quickly to determine what went wrong. I think it's pretty fascinating stuff and you sure don't see this often in the US!

ETA: Interesting bit from SpaceNews:

The failure will likely raise new questions about the AJ-26 engines that currently power the first stage of the vehicle. In May, an AJ-26 engine was destroyed during a ground test (http://www.spacenews.com/article/launch-report/40668antares-aj-26-engine-suffers-test-stand-failure) at the NASA Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. Aerojet Rocketdyne, which provides the AJ-26 — a refurbished version of the Soviet-era NK-33 engine — took $17.5 million loss (http://www.spacenews.com/article/financial-report/42180aerojet-rocketdyne-takes-loss-on-aj-26-engine-problems) in its latest fiscal quarter because of issues with the AJ-26 rocket engine.

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