NASA's Morpheus test lander crashes and burns NASA's
experimental moon lander crashed and burst into flames seconds
after take-off this morning, the US space agency said. The low-
cost Project Morpheus lander prototype, designed to carry cargo
to the moon and other space destinations, lifted off the ground
successfully but then failed its first autonomous free-flight
test at the Kennedy Space Centre. Fire crews rushed to
extinguish the flames engulfing Morpheus, which is large enough
to carry 1,100 pounds of cargo to the moon, such as a humanoid
robot, a small rover or a small laboratory than can convert moon
dust to oxygen. "A hardware component failure, which prevented
it from maintaining stable flight," was to blame, NASA said,
noting that its engineers are examining test data to determine
what caused the failure. "Failures such as these were
anticipated prior to the test, and are part of the development
process for any complex spaceflight hardware," the space agency
said in a statement. "What we learn from