Antares on its way again

Live coverage: Antares rocket successfully returns to flight

In a major milestone, a redesigned Antares rocket equipped with newer, more powerful Russian-built engines boosted a space station cargo ship into orbit Monday, the first flight of the Orbital ATK launcher since an older Russian engine triggered a spectacular 2014 explosion seconds after liftoff.

Running a day late because of trouble with ground equipment, the Antares’ two RD-181 first-stage engines ignited with a burst of flame at 7:45 p.m. EDT (GMT-4) -- five minutes behind because of an unspecified problem -- throttled up to a ground-shaking 864,000 pounds of thrust and quickly pushed the 139-foot-tall rocket away into the night sky.

Burning liquid oxygen and refined kerosene, the Antares initially climbed straight up from pad OA at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport -- MARS -- at NASA’s Wallops Island, Va., flight facility before arcing over onto a southeasterly trajectory over the Atlantic Ocean, launching directly into the plane of the space station’s orbit.