NASA is down to one commercial provider of cargo to the International Space Station until an investigation determines what caused an unmanned Orbital Sciences Corp. rocket to blow up Tuesday evening shortly after lifting off from a Virginia pad.
The Antares rocket's failure leaves SpaceX as the only U.S. company able to fly cargo to the orbiting laboratory for the near future, raising the stakes of SpaceX's next launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., which is planned no earlier than Dec. 9.
A Cygnus spacecraft packed with more than 5,000 pounds of equipment and science experiments was destroyed Tuesday when the 14-story rocket suffered a problem with its first stage and fell back to the ground, generating a massive fireball on impact.
No one was injured. The severity of damage to the Wallops Island launch pad was not immediately known.
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