Orbital Sciences shares plunge after Antares rocket explodes

Orbital Sciences Corp. fell as much as 17 percent after its Antares rocket exploded in a fireball shortly after lifting off from a launch pad at Wallops Island, Virginia. There were no injuries, the company said.

Shares of the Dulles, Virginia-based aerospace company tumbled to as low as $24.51 in New York today, after the explosion.

The mission was the fifth launch of the company's Antares rocket, and its third to pair the rocket with Orbital's Cygnus cargo logistics spacecraft. The capsule carried 5,050 pounds (2,290 kilograms) of supplies for the station and was named for the late Donald "Deke" Slayton, an original Mercury astronaut, Orbital Sciences said on its website.

"We need to go through the investigation and be very thorough," Frank Culbertson, executive vice president and general manager of the Advanced Programs Group at Orbital, said on a NASA webcast today. "We will found out what went wrong and we will correct it and fly again."

The unmanned rocket "suffered a catastrophic anomaly," six seconds into a flight intended to ferry supplies to the International Space Station, NASA said in a blog on its website. The company doesn't know the full cost of the explosion yet, Culbertson said. The cost of the rocket and spacecraft was more than $200 million dollars, he said.

Investigation Team

Orbital Sciences and NASA are forming a team to investigate the accident, the agency said in a webcast, adding that all personnel at the NASA launch pad were accounted for following the accident.

It was the third such mission conducted by Orbital Sciences under a $1.9 billion contract with NASA that commercializes routine cargo flights previously conducted by the agency. Elon Musk's SpaceX also provides shipments of food and supplies to the station.

The privately developed Antares is a medium-class launch vehicle that can power spacecraft weighing as much as 14,000 pounds into low-Earth orbit, the company said. The rocket had completed four successful missions, before the Oct. 28 accident, and counted NASA and the U.S. Air Force among its customers.

President Barack Obama was briefed on the launch failure of the Antares rocket by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Anita Decker Breckenridge and will continue to get updates as more information becomes available, Eric Schultz, principle deputy press secretary said.