Falcon 9, a rocket ship part of the Space Exploration Technology Corporation booster that was commissioned to deliver supplies to the worldwide Space Station, has exploded shortly after takeoff this morning at Cape Canaveral.
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Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX, also tweeted, at first writing, “Falcon 9 experienced a problem shortly before first stage shut down”.
The Falcon rockets are meant to ferry Dragon cargo capsules to the worldwide Space Station and are thankfully unmanned.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER – Are we nearing a cliff where the safety of astronauts aboard the worldwide Space Station could be jeopardized by a lack of supplies?
NASA noted on its Web site that another resupply craft is set to launch on July 3.
Including its station cargo runs for Nasa, SpaceX has a backlog of almost 50 missions, worth more than $7bn, including dozens of commercial communications satellites.
“This is real science and failures are to be expected, sometimes catastrophic ones, but we are not going to let this deter us”, said Rachel Lindbergh, one of the student microgravity researchers. In October this year, SpaceX’s USA rival Orbital Sciences lost its Antares rocket with a Cygnus cargo carrier aboard in a fireball launch-pad explosion.
How Sunday’s explosion will impact SpaceX’s standing in future competitions is yet to be seen, but the Air Force will surely be interested in knowing the cause and whether it can be reliably fixed. About an hour later, he added preliminary analysis: “There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank”.
The 208-foot-tall (63-meter) Falcon 9 rocket had flown 18 times previously since its 2010 debut, all successfully.
Shotwell assured reporters that the California-based company will fix the problem – “and get back to flight”. “The commercial cargo program was designed to accommodate loss of cargo vehicles”, he said, according to The Washington Post. Nasa says, however, the astronauts aboard the station are ‘secure. The next U.S. launch will be SpaceX’s next mission, scheduled for September.
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“We saw some pressurization indications in the second stage which we will be investigating”, Shotwell said. This incidence has also raised concerns about the flow of equipment and food to the astronauts living in space stations.
