The company was conducting a test firing of its unmanned Falcon rocket when the blast occurred shortly after 9 a.m.
Advertisement
SpaceX and Musk both said they don’t know the root cause of the explosion yet, and are still investigating.
An official Air Force survey from 2015, which investigative reporter Joseph Trevithick obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and provided to The Daily Beast, revealed that the Air Force contacted SpaceX to determine whether the Falcon 9 could replace the United Launch Alliance’s rockets with their Russian engines.
Local authorities took to Twitter to assure residents that they were not at risk.
“Heard/felt weird BOOMS this morning as SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded”.
“We actually thought the building was collapsing, it shook us so bad”, Seemangal wrote in a tweet, quoting his source. SpaceX stuck its first rocket landing back in December and plans to begin using reusable rockets for routine launches later this year.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now on his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa, with stops so far in Nigeria and Kenya.
The explosion took place at 9:07 a.m. today on SpaceX’s dedicated launchpad on the Cape Canaveral Air Force Base. The companies unveiled the agreement last week, but said it was contingent on the successful launch of the satellite and completion of its in-orbit tests.
“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”, SpaceX said in a statement.
In a post from Africa, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he was deeply disappointed at the loss of the satellite which he said would have provided connectivity to many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent. “We want to make sure we isolate any potential problem”, said Shawn Walleck, a spokesman for the Air Force’s 45th Space Wing, “because at this point, we’ve had no casualties, we’ve had no injuries, and we want to keep it that way”.
SpaceX hasn’t debuted on the stock market yet, but shares in Musk’s other companies, Tesla Motors and SolarCity, were respectively down 4 and 5.5 percent on Thursday, though it wasn’t clear if that was attributable to the Falcon 9 blowing up.
It was not clear if anyone was hurt by the blast, and a spokesman for SpaceX did not immediately return a call for comment.
SpaceX says it has a backlog of more than $10 billion in launch orders from customers including NASA and commercial companies.
It’s the same kind of SpaceX rocket used to launch space station supplies for NASA. The rocket that blew up on Thursday had never been flown before.
Last year, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said he was eager to use the AMOS-6 satellite to deliver broadband connectivity to hard-to-reach parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Advertisement
It’s uncertain if the company will attempt another satellite launch soon. SpaceX, one of two companies making deliveries, is also working on a crew capsule to ferry station USA astronauts.
