Aviation Week editors discuss the failures by Orbital Sciences and Virgin Galactic.

Orbital Sciences Corp. plans to re-engine its Antares launch vehicle and use one or two alternate launch vehicles initially to meet its International Space Station resupply commitments to NASA after last week’s launch failure.

The lessons the Antares failure board learns will be applied to future commercial spaceflight contracts for cargo—and eventually crew—as NASA continues to shift U.S. access to low Earth orbit onto privately owned vehicles.

After astronauts install a special 3-D printer in the ISS’s Microgravity Science Glovebox and set up the high-definition video cameras that will watch its extruder and work platform from two different angles, controllers at a small startup company in California will send signals to begin making things in orbit.

Boeing and SpaceX are preceding apace with their plans for commercial crew space capsules, now that the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals ruled against Sierra Nevada’s protest.

Musk’s approach strikes me as very similar to one used by another great creator and businessman of his time: Walt Disney.

Contingency planning and the multi-vehicle approach to supplying the International Space Station will mitigate the effects of the worst accident to hit human spaceflight since the Columbia disaster, but not without some belt-tightening and lesson-learning in the months ahead.