Nasa

It's likely that many WIRED readers will spend the evening of 5 November watching fireworks outside in a chilly field. But none will (hopefully) see anything quite this dramatic.

These pictures, just released by Nasa, detail in visually spectacular detail the last moments of the Orbital ATK Antares rocket, which exploded on Wallops Island in Virginia on 28 October, 2014.


The rocket, which was carrying 2,267 kg of supplies for the International Space Station but was unmanned, suffered a launch anomaly a few seconds after launch, fell back to the ground and exploded.

The investigation into the launch failure only recently concluded, with Nasa's independent team reporting the fire was probably caused by friction amongst rubbing parts in a liquid oxygen turbopump, or else a design or debris issue. The most likely cause, it seems, is that essentially Orbital's AJ-26 engine, bought from Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, who picked it up from the Soviet Lunar programme and refurbished it, stopped working. "Just over 15 seconds into flight, as shown in Figure 1, an explosion in the Antares Main Engine System (MES) occurred, causing the vehicle to lose thrust and fall back toward the ground," Nasa said in the report.

The cost of the $15 million damages to Wallops was reportedly split between Nasa, Orbital and the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority.


Orbital Sciences, which is now Orbital ATK, was not the only space company to experience a rocket failure in a turbulent 12 months of private space travel, with Space X also seeing one of its unmanned rockets go down in flames in June, before a Russian satellite rocket also exploded.

Orbital has since purchased a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket to get its deliveries going again by 2016, while SpaceX intends to launch another craft before the end of this year.