“Per standard procedure, the pad was clear and there were no injuries”, said the statement.
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People in buildings several miles from the facility wrote on social media that they felt the blast, and live television images showed thick black smoke coming from the site.
The U.S. Air Force said on its Twitter account that an explosion occurred on the pad at Cape Canaveral.
“We remain committed to our mission of connecting everyone, and we will keep working until everyone has the opportunities this satellite would have provided”, said Zuckerberg, who is now in Africa.
The explosion occurred at Launch Complex 40 at the Air Force station, right next door to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where emergency staff went on standby and monitored the air for any toxic fumes. “In general, there is a very buoyant insurance industry surrounding the space industry”, Shuman said to Gizmodo in an email.
SpaceX contracts with NASA and other organizations to carry satellites into orbit or deliver supplies to the International Space Station.
SpaceX pad on fire!
Falcon 9s have made headlines since the first one was launched in 2010, so here’s a handy guide with everything you need to know about the rockets. It was supposed to hoist an Israeli communications satellite this weekend that would have been used in Facebook’s first attempt to provide the Internet to rural areas from space.
This is a breaking news story, and we’ll update this post with reliable information as it emerges.
According to the SpaceX statement, the payload was lost in the accident, meaning it was already attached to the rocket when the explosion happened.
The launch window for the Falcon 9 was scheduled to open at 3 a.m. EDT on Saturday, Sept. 3. At Shuttles Restaurant and Bar, a Merritt Island landmark whose tagline is “Where astronauts have been lunching for over 30 years”, waitress Nancy Risola said the explosion was all the talk of Thursday’s busy lunch hour crowd.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 by former PayPal entrepreneur and Tesla Motors CEO Musk with the goal of creating the technologies to reduce space transportation costs and enable the colonisation of Mars.
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The loss will likely throw a wrench in the private space company’s ambitious launch plans for the rest of the year.
