Antares Hits the Mark

摘要

Congratulations are in order to Orbital Sciences Corp. for the successful inaugural flight April 21 of its Antares medium-lift rocket, which will be used to launch commercial logistics missions to the international space station. Antares continues a string of successful rocket debuts that follows a demoralizing rash of inaugural-flight failures in the 1990s. More than 50 years into the Space Age, rocket science finally appears to be maturing to the point that one can envision spaceflight becoming truly routine in the not-to-distant future.