Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Space flight is no cakewalk – NASA Antares rocket explodes during take-off


An unmanned Antares rocket, built and launched by Orbital Sciences Corp and carrying supplies to the International Space Station exploded seconds after lift-off news.sky.com. Among its payload were some Maryland crab cakes for the space station crew which has gone up in smoke.
As per reports of NASA, the rocket was carrying a Cygnus spacecraft packed with nearly 2,200-Kg of food, supplies and materials for space experiments. One of the items on board was a nitrogen tank to manage the air supply of the ISS, and a whole lot of items necessary for conducting various experiments.
People have been cautioned to stay away from any debris they might find because these could result in problems when coming in contact with human beings.
Incidentally, the Antares rocket, built and launched by Orbital Sciences Corp, and being sent to ISS from the launch pad at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia exploded in a huge fireball within seconds. It was enveloped in flames.
Since NASA has retired its own space shuttles, it has to depend on alternate sources and is paying Virginia-based Orbital Sciences and California-based SpaceX to keep the space station stocked. Orbital has a $1.9bn (£1.1bn) contract with NASA for a total of eight supply missions and the mission that went wrong and known as CRS-3, would have been its fourth trip to the ISS. As per plans, Cygnus was to have remained in orbit till 2 November, and subsequently, fly itself to the station to enable the astronauts to use a robotic crane to snare the capsule and attach it to a berthing port.

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