NASA photos show the Antares rocket explosion in gritty detail
When Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket exploded last year, your only real view at the time was a grainy video. However, you should now have a much better sense of what happened: NASA has posted large photos from the failed launch on Flickr. They not only show the incident in exceptional (almost uncomfortable) detail, but do a better job of illustrating the magnitude of what happened. This was a very large vehicle coming down very quickly, and the impact enveloped much of the launch site in fire and smoke.
You hopefully won't see more photos like this for a long, long time. NASA recently wrapped up its investigation of the disaster, and it believes that a pump failure (due to either a design flaw or debris) sent Antares crashing down. Orbital Sciences will need to tackle the underlying causes before future iterations of the rocket can fly -- this kind of calamity shouldn't happen again.
[Image credit: NASA HQ Photo, Flickr]
