Morpheus lander crashes, burns and explodes in untethered flight test, NASA remains optimistic (video)

As noisy as we found Project Morpheus' tethered flight test, its untethered follow-up was far, far louder. Yesterday, the experimental lander suffered a hardware component failure, which NASA says "prevented it from maintaining stable flight." This caused it to crash into the ground and well, explode. On the upside, the space agency says that these kinds of failures were anticipated, stating that they are a normal part of the development process and will be used to build better systems moving forward. You didn't think Curiosity made its touchdown on Mars without learning from a few mistakes, did you? Click onwards to check out the test -- and its aftermath -- in 5, 4, 3, 2, er...

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Morpheus lander crashes, burns and explodes in untethered flight test, NASA remains optimistic (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Aug 2012 07:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.