Co-pilot may have deployed this system too soon.

They’re a sad crowd, b.

When the towers fell, I had applied for a job at the comm center on top of the new-tower-to-be. Didn’t get it, but you have to be strong enough to at least raise a defiant fist against failure of any kind.

For Virgin — now, I may be wrong here, but I doubt it — I believe backers will be flocking in, and they’ll be up again quite soon.

Link

We’ve worked closely with Scaled on some of our rocket projects. A tough time right now.

I wonder why anyone would even consider such a thing.

10-31-2014 | Lee Billings

When, seconds after liftoff on October 28, an Antares rocket built by the Orbital Sciences Corp. fell back and exploded over its launch pad at a NASA facility in Wallops Island, Va., much more than its payload of small satellites and International Space Station cargo may have been lost.

The rocket did not carry a crew, and no one was injured, but damage to the surrounding launch infrastructure was significant. A cursory inspection revealed shattered windows, imploded doors and broken equipment around the launch pad that will require extensive repairs. How much damage has been dealt to Orbital Sciences’s reputation, and perhaps even NASA’s quest to outsource orbital flights, is less certain.

Orbital Sciences is one of two companies NASA now relies on to fly supplies to the space station. Four previous Antares flights, including three to the station, had launched successfully, and five resupply flights remain in the company’s $1.9-billion NASA contract. Orbital Sciences’ stock price has fallen by some 15 percent in recent days and the rocket mishap potentially complicates its planned merger with another aerospace company, Alliant Techsystems. “This is a big problem for NASA,” says Roger Handberg, a space policy expert at the University of Central Florida. “They are now dependent on the commercial sector to lift payloads to the space station, and their own rocket, the Space Launch System, is at least three years out and is intended for other purposes. So what happens if Orbital Sciences can’t get its rockets fixed? Then what do you do?”

More.