A modified version of Russia’s Soyuz rocket launched Friday from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a spaceport on the edge of the Russian Arctic, with a military satellite whose mission is shrouded in mystery.
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.