SpaceX said on Friday it would shift Florida flights to a almost completed second site after damage to its launch pad on Thursday from the explosion of a rocket belonging to the space services company run by Elon Musk. It only repeated that the incident occurred during fueling of the launch vehicle before a static fire test, rather than during the test itself, and that the “anomaly” originated around the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. The explosion occurred at 9:07 a.m. ET as the company was preparing to test fire Falcon 9’s powerful engines in preparation for a launch on Saturday.
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The U.S. Air Force said in a statement that damage appeared to be contained within SpaceX’s launch complex. We are now in the early process of reviewing approximately 3000 channels of telemetry and video data covering a time period of just 35-55 milliseconds.
While the accident caused a Web frenzy because of the satellite’s Facebook connection, it may not prove more than a short-term setback for SpaceX, which has scheduled more than 70 launches representing US$10bn in contracts.
“There’s going to be so much damage”, said a former NASA official who heard the blast from his home and who asked not to be named. “We remain confident in our commercial partners and firmly stand behind the successful 21st century launch complex that NASA, other federal agencies, and USA commercial companies are building on Florida’s Space Coast”, it added. “We are confident the two launch pads can support our return to flight and fulfill our upcoming manifest needs”.
The satellite would have provided broadband internet coverage to sub-Saharan Africa, as part of an initiative spearheaded by Facebook. Less clear is how soon SpaceX will begin to fly out that manifest, now that it has sustained the second loss of a Falcon 9 rocket in the last 15 months.
In the wake of the SpaceX Falcon 9 explosion that rocked Cape Canaveral yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a response on Facebook. After a careful survey of Bennu to characterize the asteroid and locate the most promising sample sites, OSIRIS-REx will collect between 60 to 2,000 grams of surface material with its robotic arm and return the sample to Earth via a detachable capsule in 2023, the USA space agency said. We remain committed to our mission of connecting everyone, and we will keep working until everyone has the opportunities this satellite would have provided.
To identify the root cause of the mishap, SpaceX engineers followed an established contingency plan that called for preserving all possible evidence.
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The venture has done thorough investigations of its accidents in the past and should be able to learn from this incident, Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said in an interview.
