Reply to post: Re: Blown up not blew up

Ex-Soviet engines fingered after Antares ROCKET launch BLAST

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Blown up not blew up

In my humble opinion, that did not look like the Range Safety guy hit the big red Flight Termination Button.

Three reasons:

1) terminating a flight so soon is likely to achieve exactly what happened -- the vehicle falls back on the expensive launch infrastructure, causing lots of damage. Waiting another 10 seconds or so would have put the vehicle over water.

2) The time from ignition to explosion was about 6 seconds. That's very little time to identify an anomaly, conclude that the anomaly was sufficiently serious that the flight was no a risk, and abort it.

3) The range safety officer is a NASA guy. If NASA blew the thing up, I reckon Orbital would have said something about it, just to share the misery.

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