'catastrophic anomaly'

I am cheating - this is not my photo, but it is my screencap. this is all I'm thinking about right now.

an unmanned (thankfully, thankfully) supply vessel to the ISS just exploded as it left the launchpad. I watch these launches all the time, and there's always a tension during the countdown, but I've never seen anything like this before.

spaceflight is not simple. it's expensive and it's complex and it's dangerous. humans are fallible creatures and we work with imperfect tools. co-operation makes us more than the sum of our parts, but sometimes things just go badly.

seeing how horribly an operation can go wrong makes me appreciate what an incredible human endeavour it is when it goes right.