Oops...

“ROCKETS are tricky,” quipped Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, a firm that builds and launches them, just after one of his blew up. That thought will surely have crossed minds at Orbital Sciences, another such company, whose latest mission exploded spectacularly on October 28th, 11 seconds after it took off from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The mission-control staff themselves sent it a self-destruct order when something was clearly amiss.

SpaceX and Orbital are the only American outfits that ferry supplies to the International Space Station. The station’s crew will not be not short of rations. A Russian ship docked the following day and SpaceX is making a delivery in December. But the loss is unfortunate because a large number of scientific experiments, including many devised by schoolchildren, have gone for good.

Orbital gives its missions the names of pioneers of commercial space flight. This week’s was “Deke Slayton”, who was one of America’s first crop of astronauts, though a heart condition meant it took him until 1975 to get into space. (He went on to direct a small rocket-launching firm that will, for a fee, put cremated ashes into orbit.) Orbital’s mission controllers wore, as a joke, 1960s-style shirts during the launch, but the firm’s connection to the past runs deeper than mere fashion, for the shirt style was of an age with the engines in the failed rocket itself.

In the mid-1990s, a contractor Orbital works with bought a job lot of rocket motors built for the N1, the Soviet Union’s entry in the race to put a man on the Moon. These, which had been languishing in a warehouse in Siberia, have been refurbished and are being fitted to Orbital’s vehicles to propel them into space.

What caused the launch failure was, as The Economist went to press, unclear. But if it does turn out to have been the engine then Mr Musk, whose firm developed its own motor from scratch, will no doubt have a wry smile on his face.

^{Correction: an earlier version of this article suggested that Deke Slayton never flew in space. In fact, he was just significantly delayed in getting there. Sorry.}