Space for the day

Kenneth Chang has an article with a video (photo, above) in The New York Times about another rocket lost:

An unmanned Antares cargo rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station exploded seconds after liftoff Tuesday night. The rocket was carrying a small spacecraft full of supplies for the International Space Station.
The Antares rocket is designed to burn a mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene for the first four minutes after launching. Live video appeared to show an explosion near the base of the rocket seconds after it was launched. The rocket fell and exploded on impact near the launch platform.
The Antares rocket, carrying 5,055 pounds of supplies, science experiments and equipment, lifted off on schedule at 6:22 pm from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in eastern Virginia. But, soon after it rose into the sky, there was a flash of an explosion (photo). “The ascent stopped,” Frank L. Culbertson Jr., the executive vice president of Orbital Sciences Corporation, the maker of the rocket, said during a news conference. “There was some disassembly of the first stage, it looked like, and then it fell to earth.”
No one was injured.
Orbital, based in Dulles, Virginia, first launched a fourteen-story-high Antares rocket on its maiden flight in April of 2013. It then conducted a demonstration flight to the space station to show NASA the capabilities of the rocket and the cargo spacecraft. Then came two more flights carrying cargo to the space station, part of a program in which NASA has hired private companies to ferry cargo to the space station. The launch would have been the third of eight cargo missions under a billion-dollar contract.
Orbital will lead an investigation. Culbertson said the company would not launch another Antares rocket until it had identified and corrected the problem.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp., of Hawthorne, California, known as SpaceX, has successfully flown four cargo missions to the space station, the most recent mission ending on Saturday.
NASA officials said the failure would not cause immediate issues for the space station, which had adequate supplies to last at least until next spring. A Russian supply rocket is set to launch to the space station on 29 October 2014, and SpaceX’s next cargo mission is scheduled for December of 2014.
“We have plenty of capability to support the crew on board,” said Michael T. Suffredini, the manager of the space station program.
By hiring private companies, NASA hoped to reduce costs, improve efficiency and spur a new commercial space industry, and it has taken a similar approach toward launching its astronauts in the future. Last month, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to take astronauts to the space station beginning as early as 2017. But the failure of the Orbital rocket will probably raise questions about whether NASA has done enough to ensure the reliability of the rockets.
This Antares rocket carried a more powerful second-stage engine for the first time. The cargo spacecraft was to reach the space station on Sunday. The rocket was also carrying a satellite, also destroyed, for Planetary Resources, a start-up looking to develop technology for mining asteroids.

Rico says this is why it's expensive to get insurance for these things... (But let's remember that NASA has had a few of its own blow up on the pad, including the Challenger.)