Orbital Sciences reacts to launch mishapHot Stock Minute
By Bill McColl 2 hours ago
Investors in space travel likely won’t be deterred despite yesterday’s launch failure of an Antares rocket owned by Orbital Sciences (ORB). But they may be slowed down a bit.
Shares of the company sank after the early evening crash just after liftoff at the Wallops Island, Virginia launch pad. The unmanned vehicle was carrying supplies to the International Space Station.
Yahoo Finance Editor in Chief Aaron Task believes Orbital Sciences, as well as other space investors such as Elon Musk of SpaceX and Alliant Techsystems (ATK), will just move on from here.
“Orbital Sciences and NASA don’t have to go back to the drawing board, but they are going to need to take a lot of time to figure out what went wrong and that’s going to delay and make more expensive future launches.”
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NASA has been farming out its space operations to private firms for several years, and Task says that hasn’t necessarily made space travel that much better.
“If NASA had been doing this and that rocket exploded people would have said, ‘the government can’t do anything right, we have to privatize it,’” he adds. “But you know what? People in private industry make mistakes, too.”
Task says let’s face it, heading into the Final Frontier is risky business.
“It’s not easy to do this stuff, so mistakes are going to be made,” he says.
Task sees a positive in how the team at Orbital Sciences handled the mishap.
“The rocket exploded because they saw things going awry and they hit the self-destruct button,” he points out. “So the people at Orbital Sciences are saying their safety procedures worked exactly as they were supposed to.”
And Task feels this accident is just a speed bump in overall effort to tame space.
“It’s a big setback for Orbital Sciences, it’s a black eye for NASA, but this, too, shall pass.”
Before the crash, shares of Orbital Sciences had been on a tear, increasing by a third since the beginning of the year.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/hot-stock-minute/orbital-sciences-looks-to-move-ahead-after-launch-mishap-133724276.html
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