Reporters run for cover as Antares rocket explodes

A Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo freighter departed the International Space Station Wednesday after delivering more than 7,800 pounds of equipment and experiments, heading for an extended mission with payloads to study fire behavior in microgravity and test a next-generation radio system.

A two-stage Northrop Grumman Antares rocket rolled out of its horizontal integration facility Monday for the mile-journey south to launch pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia, where liftoff on a space station resupply mission is scheduled for Wednesday.

An Orbital ATK investigation into last year’s Antares rocket crash in Virginia identified a decades-old manufacturing defect inside an AJ26 engine turbopump as the most likely cause of the failure, but a team of NASA engineers was not so sure in their report.