Purpose. Ore mining involves the destruction of large volumes of hard rocks, which requires preliminary fragmentation by using drilling-and-blasting operations. Therefore, special attention is paid to the improvement and development of new methods for calculating the parameters of drilling-and-blasting operations that will improve the indices of drivage and stoping operations [1, 2]. The application of emulsion explosives, which are absolutely safe for transportation and storage, environmentally friendly as well as cost-effective [3-7] is another way of improvement of blasting technology. Therefore, at present moment, one of the main problems of mining production is increasing the efficiency of the rock massif fragmentation by using explosion energy. Methodology. The creation of a new theory of rock breaking by an explosion around the charging cavity has been performed with the application of well-known laws of the theory of elasticity and the basic provisions of the quasistatic-wave hypothesis of the mechanism of solid medium breaking under the action of an explosion
