Your new day continues right now. This is New Day with Chris Cuomo, Kate Bolton and Mikaela Pereira. Good morning. Welcome back to New Day. It is Wednesday, October 29th. Now just about 8 o'clock in the east, Chris Cuomo and Alison Camarata here as the country wakes up to news of this. Oh my goodness, that is an unmanned rocket, exploding seconds after a lift off in Virginia tonight, then crashing down onto the launchpad into a ball of flames. The privately built rocket was carrying some 5,000 pounds of supplies and experiments to the equipment, I should say, to the crew on board the International Space Station. We are following the very latest for you from all angles. We begin with CNN's Tom Foreman live in Washington, for us. Tom, what is the latest? The latest is the official of this company that were oral sciences. We are up looking at the telemetry from this rocket, from the moment this happened, and pretty much all night. They are looking at electronic signals coming off this rocket about its force, its altitude, its attitude, its speed, the temperature, everything they can to see if there are any signs and the numbers about where things started to go wrong. And at this hour, investigators are spreading out through the marshes there in coastal Virginia, trying to pick up every piece they can to put it back together and solve this mystery. The first stage was just seconds into a four-minute burn when the Antares rocket stalled, fell backward, and exploded. Nearly three quarters of a million pounds of thrust with haywire, and spectators across the base had the blast shook the ground even there. Immediately, we've probably got five seconds in. You just saw kind of a fireball, and it wasn't, it even tell something immediately that something was wrong. It also clearly shook Virginia-based orbital sciences, the private contractor that built the rocket under a nearly $2 billion contract of NASA now needs answers. The investigation will include evaluating the debris that we will find around the launch pad. If you find anything that washes ashore in the local area or came down on your farm, definitely do not touch it. No one was hurting the explosion, but gone in a flash, 1,600 pounds of science experiments on everything from meteors to human blood flow. More than 1,600 pounds of hardware, computers, spacewalk equipment, and 1,400 pounds of food for the ISS crew. That does not create an instant emergency, but it will put extra pressure on upcoming missions to reestablish the supply chain to those astronauts in orbit. And the explosion could create political pressure too, in the continuing debate over how much space travel can or should be put into the hands of private companies. It's impossible to tell with all that force how far all these little pieces went or how long it will take to collect them all. But the investigation to figure out what happened here could certainly take weeks, maybe even months before they have a full answer, or several sciences, however, says the Antares rocket will not fly again until they know what went wrong. Yes, of course that makes sense. All right, joining us to talk more about the catastrophic launch, CNN Space Analyst, Miles O'Brien, and JD Taylor. He's a reporter for USAInSpace.com and an eyewitness on the scene last night during this launch explosion. Gentlemen, thanks for being here. JD, I want to start with you. Tell us what you saw last night. Yes, how you doing? Well, we were in the press area, the press viewing area, and we were watching launch. Everything was going as expected. It had a very good countdown, very clear weather. We watched it actually clear the ad and, and surely after clearing the pad, you could tell, just didn't have the thrust that it should have, and it started dropping back, and that's when everything started exploding. And the explosion was very loud, very bright, it filled our cameras, and yes. But what was the reaction when you realized that something had gone terribly wrong? Well, first of all, being pressed, we just wanted to get the shot. But it came very clear that it was really bad. We saw the explosion was getting bigger and bigger, and the sonic boom actually hit us. We could feel the boom hit our chest. And at that point, the safety area people are telling us to get back to the bus, to evacuate the area, and we followed directions. We all ran for the bus. Left everything there, everything out, and this went back to the bus. But we can see that this is the huge explosion. We can see the fire back, rain back down onto the pad, so I noticed the image of the pad. And when the safety crews did a really good job getting it out of there. And how soon after liftoff did the explosion happen? Within seconds, it was probably about six seconds. You can tell something, it was wrong. You can see it starting to drop back down again, and that's when the first explosion started. And shortly after, there was secondary and third-dairy explosions and the entire thing was a huge fire bomb. Miles, I want to bring you in. So it was within that six seconds to 20 seconds, it was pretty much over. Okay, got it. Miles, you've covered dozens of these space launches. What do you think happened? Well, if you look very carefully what was going on in that rocket plume from these Soviet era engines, these are, by the way, our 40-year-old engines that were originally built by the Soviets to launch their boom craft, which never succeeded. They were purchased by the US Corporation Aeroget, refurbished, and what it appears to be, is some sort of debris coming off of the lower part of the engine in the plume. After that, you see a change in color in the rocket plume itself, and then things start to go bad very quickly. How much of it was the actual failure of some sort of mechanism on the rocket, and how much of it was later in the decision to push the button to destroy the craft, the range safety device, unclear where that begins and ends. So, Miles, what about these private space contractors? Are they subject to the same safety measures that NASA was? Well, safety is high, but it's a different way of contracting. It's worth putting out that NASA has never built a rocket. They've always used contractors, whether they were Boeing or Lockheed Martin or their predecessor companies. What's happening here with orbital sciences and its competitors, in this case, SpaceX out of California, is a different way of doing contracting. So, instead of being on the factory floor, telling them how to attach all the pieces of a car, they're going to hurts and renting the car. So, it's a little different relationship between NASA and the contractor, but the safety standards are supposed to be at a fairly high level. Having said that, the contractor does have more latitude and how they build the rocket. JD, you are a space enthusiast. Have you ever seen anything like this before? Have you been present for one of the explosions? No, I have not been. So, yeah, it was a very spectacular disartening, but a very impressive thing to be part of that history. How many spectators were with you? We had a good amount of press there. There were about 30 or 40 people in that area. Plus, there was also the National National Social Group, which, again, is another 20 or 30 people. And the VIP area is very close to that as well. What a shock. What impact does this have on the space station and space travel event? The I.M. Well, first of all, the space station is going to be fine. They have, even if nothing arrived there, and they would have enough food until March. And as a matter of fact, this morning, while everybody in the East Coast was asleep, a Russian rocket, a freighter, called a progress successfully launched in the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and is safely on its way to the International Space Station to resupply it. SpaceX is planning a launching December at February, and Orbital was on the books for an April launch. That one is probably not going to happen, not only do they have all these questions surrounding their rocket, and maybe their rocket engines, but there was significant damage to the launch pad, and you can only launch this vehicle from one place, while of silence. So this is going to be a big step back for Orbital Sciences. The big picture here, though, is that you've got to remember, getting from 0 to 17,500 miles an hour in about eight minutes is not easy. It never will be, and it's not routine. So every now and then, all you have to do is spring a tiny little leak, and you have a really bad day. And that's what we're talking about. That's such a great reminder. These space launches are never routine. You think that they are, because they're down, they're calculated down to within a millisecond, but they are never routine, and as we've seen, sometimes things tragically go wrong. JD Taylor, thanks so much for the video that you have provided for us, and for your first hand experience, and miles, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much. Let's go over to Chris. Now to news that the Feds are running.