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Enlarge / What the business end of a Falcon 9 rocket looks like during a launch. (credit: SpaceX)

10:20am ET Update: SpaceX released the following statement to Ars regarding today's accident:

"SpaceX can confirm that in preparation for today's static fire, there was an anomaly on the pad resulting in the loss of the vehicle and its payload. Per standard procedure, the pad was clear and there were no injuries."

It is notable that the issue appears to have been with the pad and ground systems, and not the rocket. But it is highly unfortunate that the Amos 6 satellite was lost as part of the test.

NASA has made a concerted push toward diversity in its astronaut corps over recent decades, filling its ranks with women and minorities. The space agency’s most recent class, selected in 2013, featured four women and four men. It would have been equally spectacular for NASA to have veteran astronaut Peggy Whitson emerge from a Russian space capsule next spring, holding the US record for most time accrued in space by a single astronaut.

But this no longer appears likely to happen. When Whitson met with the media this week in Houston, as part of the lead up to her Nov. 15 launch to the International Space Station, the veteran astronaut said her return date from space had been pushed forward to April 20, 2017, nearly a full month short of a typical six-month increment. “The original schedule was such that we thought I might break the record as well, but that’s not going to happen,” Whitson explained.

It was only last month that NASA’s Jeff Williams, nearing the end of his third increment on the space station, surpassed Scott Kelly’s cumulative time in space, 520 days. When Williams returns to Earth on September 6, he will have spent a cumulative 534 days in space. Whitson, with 377 days accrued so far, already the most for any woman in history, was to have easily surpassed him thanks to a mission that was supposed to return on May 15. But now her capsule will return nearly a month early, on April 20, to Kazakhstan. That will leave her with 532 total days in space, two short of Williams US record.

Enlarge (credit: Chris Foresman)

BRUSSELS—A war of words has erupted between Europe’s competition chief and Apple CEO Tim Cook after Ireland was ordered to reclaim €13 billion (£11.1 billion/$14.5 billion) in back taxes from the company.

Cook, in an interview with the Irish Independent, labelled Brussels' competition chief Margrethe Vestager’s decision as “total political crap.” He claimed Ireland was being "picked on" and that he hoped to see the Irish government launch an appeal against the ruling.

On Tuesday, Vestager said that the European Commission’s two-year investigation had found Apple guilty of receiving illegal state aid from Ireland thanks to so-called sweetheart tax deals in 1991 and 2007. She said that Ireland allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of one percent on its European profits in 2003, down to as low as 0.005 percent in certain years.

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Two of the gaming world's biggest properties battled major outages on Wednesday, as Blizzard's World of Warcraft was slammed by a distributed denial of service attack, while EA's Battlefield 1 suffered a suspected DDoS thrashing.

Players hoping to take part in the online-only beta of EA's forthcoming World War I shooter Battlefield 1 were left frustrated for most of the day after the servers went down, preventing people from logging in. Blizzard, meanwhile, experienced difficulties of its own, confirming that it was being targeted by a sustained DDoS attack seemingly timed to coincide with the release of Legion, the World of Warcraft expansion.

It is unclear, however, whether the two attacks are linked.