Gallery: Antares rocket explodes

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral at 11:05 p.m. EDT (0305 GMT) tonight to send Orbital ATK’s commercial Cygnus cargo freighter to the International Space Station. Follow the mission in our live journal.

A forecast of low ceilings, thick clouds and rainy weather Thursday has led NASA and Northrop Grumman officials to push back the launch of an Antares rocket and a space station-bound supply ship from Virginia’s Eastern Shore to Friday morning.

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.