NEW YORK: An unmanned Orbital Sciences Corp. rocket carrying cargo for the international space station suffered a catastrophic failure seconds after liftoff Tuesday, dealing a potential setback to NASA’s program to privatize such missions.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said there were no injuries but launch facilities suffered significant damage.
The launch was supposed to be the third cargo resupply mission by Orbital Sciences to the space station. NASA also has contracted with Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX as the company is known, to ferry food, other supplies and scientific experiments to the orbiting laboratory.
But Tuesday’s events are bound to ground the Antares rocket for at least several months, while NASA and company experts dissect data, determine what went wrong and put fixes in place. In the meantime SpaceX will have to try to pick up the slack despite its already crowded manifest and lengthy delays in launching satellites for other customers.
The countdown and liftoff of the Antares rocket around 6:22 p.m. Eastern time from Wallops Island, Va., were normal, with ground controllers seeing no problems. But within several seconds, video images showed the top of the rocket—housing the Cygnus cargo capsule and its roughly 5,000 pounds of cargo—veering off its normal course.
