The Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket, with the Cygnus spacecraft onboard, is seen on launch Pad-0A, Sunday, October 26, 2014, at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
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It has that regal and beautiful look – “a study in latent power”.
That same latent power went elsewhere when a few seconds after launch the rocket exploded.
So did the share price of Orbital Sciences.
Downwards.
It is just another example of the severe danger of space and its accoutrements.
Since the first manned flight by Yuri Gagarin in 1961 there have been surprisingly few deaths and injuries, but the danger is always there.
Remember the shuttle disasters, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003.
Fourteen astronauts died in those two accidents alone.
I am all for the private sector providing the wherewithal to supply the International Space Station instead of the high-priced Russians, but this explosion is a setback for NASA and Orbital Sciences.
A setback that they will overcome.
Yuri Gagarin’s autobiography details that just before his launch an electrician revealed he had dropped a nut into the control cabinet and he could not sleep thinking about the nut floating in weightless space and shorting out some important terminals.
The launch was delayed to recover the nut.
That was 53 years ago and the electrician should be coming up for parole any day now. LOL.
For every extra kilogram carried on a space flight, 530kg of excess fuel are needed at lift-off.
So with a two-tonne payload aboard the fuel load was 1060 tonnes and you saw it explode.
The little Mars Rover, Opportunity, turned its camera on to the passing comet from the bank of the Endeavour Crater on Mars.
Opportunity is the rover that passed over Nobbys Head on Mars early this year in its decade-long journey of exploration.
C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) is an Oort cloud comet discovered on January 3, 2013 by Robert H. McNaught at Siding Spring Observatory using the 0.5-metre (20 inch) Uppsala Southern Schmidt Telescope.
“It’s excitingly fortunate that this comet came so close to Mars to give us a chance to study it with the instruments we’re using to study Mars,” said Opportunity science team member Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, who co-ordinated the camera pointing.
“The views from Mars rovers, in particular, give us a human perspective, because they are about as sensitive to light as our eyes would be.”
Opportunity has been roving on Mars since January 2004 and has provided evidence about the Red Planet’s ancient wet environments.
