Does anyone actually want to win the medium-lift race in the United States?

Ars Technica is here to help with a guide to the medium-lift space race.

The short version

• It has been 13 years since the debut of a new medium-lift rocket in the United States, the Antares vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation.
• The initial 100-series variant of the Antares rocket was kind of a hot mess.
• The rocket used old Soviet engines built during the era when Apollo astronauts were landing on the Moon.

What happened

Decades later, in the 1990s, Aerojet acquired the engines and refurbished them for a rocket that would launch in the 2010s. Predictably, on the fifth launch of an Antares rocket in 2014, it exploded.

Why it matters

The Antares vehicle is the last of a dying breed of medium-lift rockets—defined as having a lift capacity of 2 to 20 metric tons—in the United States.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.