Prototype Low-Cost Lander Crashed And Burned In First Autonomous Flight Test

While NASA celebrates the success of the Curiosity Rover landing on Mars, another program suffered a setback Thursday when the Morpheus Lander prototype crashed and burned only a few seconds after lifting off on its first autonomous test flight. In a video release, NASA said that "during the free flight test of the Project Morpheus vehicle at the Shuttle Landing Facility, the vehicle lifted off the ground and then experienced a hardware component failure. This failure prevented the vehicle from maintaining stable flight. "No one was injured and the resulting fire was extinguished by Kennedy Space Center fire personnel. "Failures such as these were antici