Accomack leaders get earful about rocket explosion
- An Assawoman resident says the blast from a rocket explosion broke windows, knocked his wife down.
- A team investigating found "nothing hard" fell outside the hazard zone.
- Some cargo from the mission was found intact and can be reused.
- Accomack's Board of Supervisors approved a resolution of support for spaceport operations at Wallops.
An Accomack County man whose farm is among properties closest to the Wallops Island launch facility where an Antares rocket exploded said his house was damaged and his wife was knocked down by the force of the blast.
"I barely had enough time to tell my wife to get down. This blast broke my windows, damaged my barn and knocked my wife to the ground. Almost everything on the east side of my home and shop was blown off the wall," Gerald Matthews said.
He documented via video the effects of the explosion on his home on Arbuckle Neck Road in Assawoman. Hundreds of people were allowed to enter the nearby area to view the launch, he said.
Matthews said he has never been contacted by any official about potential danger at his home during launches.
"We are people, not pawns...Please take this into consideration as you make decisions for the future," Matthews told the Accomack County Board of Supervisors, to whom he gave copies of a DVD he made of the failed launch and its aftermath.
"NASA evacuated everyone in the blast zone...Why wasn't he?" Supervisor Wanda Thornton asked, directing County Administrator Steve Miner to find out.
Miner in an update to the board about the incident said it appears there is full state and federal support to repair damage to the launch facility resulting from the explosion.
"There is a commitment there," he said, adding, "The fact that the pad was damaged obviously isn't good news."
A team investigating the disaster so far has found "there was nothing hard that fell outside the (danger) zone," Miner said.
NASA Wallops Flight Facility Director Bill Wrobel telephoned Miner earlier this month to update the county on the investigation.
Wrobel also spoke to some 80 residents of the surrounding area at a constituent meeting held by Supervisor Ron Wolff, telling them the Cygnus spacecraft the rocket was to carry to the International Space Station came apart but did not explode during the incident.
"A lot of the cargo was intact and is reusable and will be sent back up into space," Wolff said, noting Orbital is looking to do a hot fire test of a new rocket engine at Wallops in 2015.
Orbital has said the rocket's failure likely was caused by a problem with one of the two first-stage engines and that the company plans to use a different engine for future launches.
Some launches to fulfill Orbital's $1.9 billion contract to deliver cargo to the space station will happen elsewhere in the interim, Miner said.
NASA in late September released a request for proposals for a second round of cargo deliveries to the International Space Station, and in it indicted "at least one company would be at Wallops, so they've left the door open – there might be more than one, as they have this time," Miner said.
"Orbital certainly intends to be among those companies competing for that business. If they were to get the second round of contracts to supply the International Space Station, it is my understanding...it is their intent to launch those from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport," Miner said.
The board of supervisors unanimously approved sending a resolution of support for the facility and future operations there to Orbital Sciences Corporation, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport and NASA Director Charles Bolden.
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