The Falcon 9 rocket and its $200m (£150m) satellite payload were destroyed in the blast, which happened while the rocket was being test-fired just after 1pm.
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Musk set up SpaceX with the goal of slashing launch costs to make travel to Mars affordable. SpaceX uses Vandenberg to launch satellites requiring polar orbits, while Florida is better situated for satellites heading into equatorial orbits and for cargo ships flying to the International Space Station for NASA. As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk acknowledged in a tweet, the cause of the failure remains unknown. The FAA typically doesn’t do its own probe, as the agency would for an accident in the airline world.
The explosion is a setback for SpaceX.
“We’re confident in SpaceX and that they will find and resolve any issues causing this incident, and we will be ready to go once that occurs”, Iridium Communications Inc said in a statement.
If the launch pad faces lengthy repairs, SpaceX could opt to use a second Florida site, called 39A, which is located a few miles north at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and was used for space shuttle missions.
Damage hasn’t been determined yet because no one has been to the pad to evaluate it.
According to the Verge, the emergency management team of the 45th Space Wing of the Air Force is responding to the explosion. A resupply mission to the ISS via the Falcon 9 was planned for November and a first-ever crewed launch for August 2017. Its shares closed down 8.9 percent at 38.95 shekels.
“The deal will either be canceled or the price will be reduced”, said Meir Slater, head of research at Bank of Jerusalem.
Facebook would have been among the customers for bandwidth on that satellite. A almost $200 million satellite Facebook planned to use to provide internet service to Africa was on board. He’s on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa, where he has been meeting with entrepreneurs, government ministers and app developers.
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 others across the continent.
It’s unclear what Facebook plans to do next to compensate for the loss of the AMOS-6 satellite, whose 18 Gbps connections it planned to lease in partnership with Eutelsat for US$95 million across five years. The agency, which oversees US commercial rocket launches, requires that SpaceX’s flights be suspended pending results of the probe. Originated around upper stage oxygen tank.
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The latest “anomaly occurred during propellant loading of the first and second stages”, SpaceX said in a statement, adding that no one was injured.
