WPI President: NASA Will Learn From Rocket Explosion, Move Forward
WORCESTER (CBS/AP) - An unmanned commercial supply rocket bound for the International Space Station exploded moments after liftoff Tuesday evening, with debris falling in flames over the launch site in Virginia. No injuries were reported following the first catastrophic launch in NASA's commercial spaceflight effort.
The accident occurred at Orbital Sciences Corp.'s launch complex at Wallops Island.
NASA is paying billions of dollars to Orbital Sciences and the SpaceX company to make station deliveries, and it's counting on SpaceX and Boeing to start flying U.S. astronauts to the orbiting lab as early as 2017.
The Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket blew up over the launch complex. The company said everyone at the site had been accounted for, and the damage appeared to be limited to the facilities. And nothing on the lost flight was urgently needed by the six people living on the space station 260 miles into space, officials said.
The crash of the Antares rocket Tuesday night was especially hard to watch for the new president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Dr. Laurie Leshin joined the WPI campus this summer but she has years of experience as a NASA administrator. She once led teams of scientists working on the very program that created the Antares rocket.
"I was shocked and saddened for the people involved who've worked for many years to make these launches possible," Leshin told WBZ after the crash. "But we also know that space is hard. And we have to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off, figure out what went wrong and keep going forward."
No injuries were reported when the unmanned commercial supply rocket bound for the International Space exploded moments after liftoff in Virginia.
Leshin says she is confident that NASA will be able to figure out exactly what went wrong.
"The rockets are very well instrumented, so they'll get a lot of information and data back," she explained. "They have a lot of cameras on the rocket so they'll be able to really understand kind of what went wrong first probably. I think it's very likely they will get to the root cause of the problem."
Leshin says her students at WPI are expected to learn the same lesson as NASA scientists will learn this week – namely, that failure can be as instructive as success.
"It is clearly a blow, and we'll have to assess what went wrong, understand what happened and then I'm fairly certain we will keep going," she said. "We need to keep going because this is really part of our future. If we can't learn from failure we're not going to succeed as a country."
(TM and © Copyright 2014 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2014 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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