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A private Orbital Sciences-built cargo launch to the International Space Station ended in a fiery explosion just seconds after liftoff Tuesday night (Oct. 28). Orbital's unmanned Antares rocket exploded in a brilliant fireball shortly after launching from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 6:22 p.m. EDT (2222 GMT), crashing back down to the launch pad in a flaming heap. The Antares was carrying Orbital's unmanned Cygnus spacecraft, which was toting 5,000 pounds (2,268 kilograms) of food, scientific experiments and other supplies on this flight — the third cargo mission to the space station under a $1.9 billion contract the company holds with NASA.

More than 25 years ago, an abandoned NASA spacecraft fulfilled its mission, fell silent, and has since been hurtling around the sun, somewhere between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Now, a University of Arizona engineering student is trying to wake it up. Jacob Gold, an undergraduate student majoring in aerospace engineering, is on a mission against time. If he can’t make contact with the SUV-sized space probe when it swoops by the moon this summer, it will disappear into the depths of space, not to return until Gold is 50 years old.

For the better part of five decades, commercial access to space has been limited by the high cost of flight operations. However, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) has rewritten the rules by adopting a new business model and cutting-edge technologies to enhance reliability and reduce the cost of space access. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy (currently under development) will be the world’s most powerful rocket, with three Falcon 9 cores and more than twice the payload-to-orbit capacity of the space shuttle, but at only one-third the cost. It is expected to be the first rocket to break the $1,000-per-pound-to-orbit barrier, less than a tenth as much as the NASA space shuttle.