This past Monday a launch to the ISS had to be scrubbed because a private vehicle had wandered into the rocket's potential crash zone. At the time it seemed almost silly. But on Tuesday, the wisdom of that precaution became abundantly clear:
An unmanned NASA-contracted rocket exploded in midair early Tuesday evening, producing huge flames and loud booms along the eastern Virginia coast but no injuries or deaths. Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket and Cygnus cargo spacecraft had been set to launch at 6:22 p.m. ET from the Wallops Flight Facility along the Atlantic Ocean, carrying roughly 5,000 pounds of supplies and experiments to the International Space Station. It exploded about six seconds after launch. What was left of the spacecraft and rocket plummeted back to Earth, causing even more flames upon impact.
To drive home how little margin for error there is in spaceflight, just hours ago a suborbital vehicle in late stage development manned by two pilots was lost high above the
Mojave Desert:
A pilot was killed and another injured as Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo space tourism craft crashed in the California desert. The craft was flying a manned test when it experienced what the company described as "a serious anomaly". It was undergoing its first powered test flight since January over the Mojave Desert, north of Los Angeles. Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson said he was "shocked and saddened" by the "tragic loss".
- Daily Kos diarist SkepticalRaptor takes aim at some recent anti-science nonsense.
- I'm an atheist, a fairly devout one at that. But even from that skeptical perspective, this new Pope continues to command my respect and grudging admiration:
Pope Francis has waded into the controversial debate over the origins of human life, saying the big bang theory did not contradict the role of a divine creator, but even required it.
- On Nov 12, if all goes as planned, the Rosetta spaceprobe will release the Philae landing craft for the first ever soft touchdown and close up images taken from the surface of a comet. For background on the lander's design and instrumentation, click here.
- Amanda Marcotte compares and contrasts conservative reaction to Ebola, where a single person in the US has died, to the reaction to AIDS 30 plus years ago:
I thought it would be interesting, in light of this, to look at how Republicans reacted in the 1980s to an actual epidemic that was actually killing people by the thousands: AIDS. If ever there was a time to freak out and say that we have to do something to stop this epidemic, it’s when there was actually, you know, an epidemic. And yet.