He added that a loss of contact occurred two minutes and 19 seconds into the launch.
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NASA has contracted SpaceX for sending supplies to the worldwide Space Station and about 20 commercial and other satellite operators. The remnants of the craft were scattered over the Atlantic.
Orbital announced the following month that it would outsource Cygnus mission launches in order to satisfy its resupply contract with NASA.
This is the third time that a re-supply mission had failed in the last eight months.
In the aftermath of Sunday’s disastrous explosion of a SpaceX shuttle slated to carry supplies to the global Space Station, Sen. The CEO attributed the failure to “an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank”, further revealing that “data suggests counterintuitive cause”.
In a message on Twitter, Musk said the “Falcon 9 experienced a problem shortly before first stage shutdown”.
The unmanned Dragon capsule on Falcon 9 was meant to deliver 4,000 pounds of cargo to the global Space Station. Just a little more than 2 minutes into flight, there was a major failure with the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.
In the video below SpaceX executives discuss the CRS-7 mission failure.
“This isn’t the first explosion we’ve had”, said Paul Eaton, a 40-year resident of the area. Unfortunately as things begin to become more routine – Falcon 9 has flown over 15 successful flights – mistakes get made and things get overlooked. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said “several thousand engineering-hours of review” had failed to turn up a cause, while analysts began handicapping how the accident would affect the next round of bidding for NASA cargo flights.
However, Gerstenmaier did mention that the crew on the ISS will need to monitor a water filtration system which was to be resupplied during this SpaceX mission. But the Soyuz, SpaceX’s Russian competition, will launch on a trip to the ISS on July 3 and NASA says the three astronauts already on the space station were prepared for the SpaceX accident.
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The partnership between NASA and Microsoft planned a set of HoloLens devices to be sent to the global Space Station to aid with communications and training with new software called Sidekick. Doubting their capabilities automatically led to speculations regarding the space stations ambitious plans to pull off its missions in association with these partners.
