SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk had earlier posted on Twitter that the explosion was as a result of overpressure in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank.
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Stakeholders are in constant contact to discuss what went wrong and how to prevent it. SpaceX rockets have had several successful missions for NASA, but Sunday’s launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida turned out to be a disaster.
Falcon 9, SpaceX has pointed out, made history in 2012 when it delivered Dragon into the correct orbit for rendezvous with the global Space Station, making SpaceX the first commercial company ever to visit the station.
NASA spokesman George Diller noted: “We appear to have had a launch vehicle failure”, observed, while Air Force officials noted that the rocket “experienced an anomaly” 148 seconds into the flight.
Late last week, NASA’s space station program manager, Mike Suffredini, said the outpost had enough supplies on board to make it to October or so.
The firm is one of two developers building a space capsule for astronauts under a Nasa contract. It was the third cargo ship to be lost in the past few months heading to the worldwide Space Station.
SpaceX teams are reviewing data to determine root cause and promised to provide more information following a thorough fault tree analysis.
“It gives us a chance to learn an environment where we can tolerate a little more risk and then move forward with the crew environment”, Gerstenmaier said. It also carried a docking adaptor for the station as part of operations to prepare for future commercial missions.
“SpaceX has demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in its first six cargo resupply missions to the station, and we know they can replicate that success”. A Russian Progress cargo ship failed to reach the outpost in April following a problem with its Soyuz launcher. SpaceX’s President Gwynne Shotwell shortly issued a statement to reporters shortly after the accident assuring the company is working hard to find the problem, fix it “and get back to flight”.
The investigation into the incident will be overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Nasa, but in the meantime there will be no further launches.
A space vehicle engineered in the South Bay blew up as it was being launched from Florida today, a setback for Hawthorne-based SpaceX.
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The loss of cargo through this failure is significant. The space agency expected losses, just not three in under a year, he said.
