Private spaceflight company Orbital Sciences Corp. is starting to put together the timeline of events that led up to the explosion of its Antares rocket after liftoff on Oct. 28.
Orbital Sciences is still trying to figure out the root cause of the Antares rocket failure, according to Space.com. Though no one was hurt during the explosion, the rocket was carrying an unmanned Cygnus spacecraft expected to deliver supplies International Space Station for NASA when the accident occurred.
An Orbital update released on Oct. 20 said that the rocket seemed able to perform normally until about 15 seconds after launch, when some as-yet-unknown variable caused the rocket to fail.
"Evidence suggests the failure initiated in the first stage after which the vehicle lost its propulsive capability and fell back to the ground impacting near, but not on, the launch pad," Orbital Sciences representatives wrote in an update.
The rocket was launching from a pad at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia.
Orbital Sciences is currently in the middle of a $1.9 billion contract with NASA to fly eight robotic missions to the International Space Station using Cygnus and Antares.
Had the launch on Tuesday been successful it would have started the company's third official resupply trip to the ISS.
Company representatives are also examining the damage caused by the accident. An Orbital safety team determined that a "significant amount of debris" is still around the site of the failure, which the company could use as evidence to aid in their investigation, company representatives said to Space.com.
"Some of the Cygnus cargo has also been found and will be retrieved as soon as we have clearance to do so to see if any survived intact," Orbital representatives said in the same update. "After up close visual inspections by the safety team, it still appears the launch site itself avoided major damage. There is some evidence of damage to piping that runs between the fuel and commodity storage vessels and the launch mount, but no evidence of significant damage to either the storage vessels or launch mount."
Space station crew members have plenty of supplies on the orbiting lab, so there is no immediate danger posed by the Cygnus loss, NASA said this week.
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