Instead they got a life lesson about loss, but more importantly about determination, as they watched their experiment get wiped out for the second straight time by a rocket failure on Sunday.
The students from North Charleston, South Carolina, had come up with an intricate electronics circuitry experiment. It was supposed to fly last October to the International Space Station on an Antares rocket out of Wallops Island, Virginia.
But it blew up as they watched from only 1.7 miles away. Joe Garvey was knocked over by the blast coming off the launch pad. Rachel Lindbergh felt the heat on her face.
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7 comments:
NASA sure is screwing up a lot these days, beginning to look like a colossal waste of taxpayer money.
This wasn't NASA, it was Space X.
My bad, if the rocket that blew up at Wallops was also Space X, obviously investors are going to be asking questions like, is it worth the investment with so many screw ups?
SpaceX is building these rockets using a $1.7 billion dollar grant from NASA. So the taxpayer is still on the hook. Taxpayers fund NASA, NASA offers a grant to SpaceX to build rockets, SpaceX builds rockets that blow up.
Russian rocket engines are no good!
Wallops' Antares loss was not Space X - it was Orbital Sciences. This is the nature of spaceflight, particularly relatively early in programs... losses happen.
Orbital Science lost one of their most brilliant engineers and has had nothing but failures since. I hope things turn around for them...but cannot help but think that he would have made a huge difference as he did once before with their launch problems. SAD
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