SpaceX and ESA Suffer Launch Problems

It hasn’t been the best week for uncrewed space launches.

On Friday, Aug. 22, 2014, SpaceX was testing a new configuration of their F9R vertical launch and landing rocket — essentially a Falcon 9 first stage booster adapted to land on its tail after launching a payload into space — when something went wrong. It was already a few hundred meters in the air when the software onboard detected the malfunction and aborted the mission by exploding the rocket. This is done to prevent the possibi...