An explosion or fire occurring during a standard pre-launch static test prior to the engine igniting may be unique.
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The launch, which had been set for Friday faces significant delays after the blast on Thursday on the launch pad of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, inews.co.uk reported.
This morning a Falcon 9 rocket blew up on the launch pad at SpaceX’s facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have discussed plans to use low-orbit satellites to bring high-speed internet access to the many regions of the planet that don’t have it.
Representatives of Spacecom owned by Israeli Eurocom and Israeli Aerospace Industry, which manufactured Amos 6, their largest satellite to date, don’t expect to be invited to take part in the investigation.
It is not clear how long repairs to the SLC-40 launch pad will take, and SpaceX said the scope of the damage was also not entirely clear.
NASA spokesman Michael Curie said it’s too early to know whether the explosion will impact planned NASA-related SpaceX launches to the International Space Station.
But the fact that the explosion occurred before launch should help narrow down potential causes, though analysts cautioned there are still any number of possibilities. “SpaceX’s business is robust, with approximately 70 missions on our manifest worth over $10 billion”.
The Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which licenses launches, will oversee the company’s investigation into the mishap, the agency said in an email.
The social networking giant had special interest in the Falcon 9, as it was carrying an Israeli-made satellite meant to be used in Facebook’s internet.org programme, bringing connectivity to the continent.
The statement from SpaceX provided no additional information about the cause of the accident.
As news of the Falcon 9 explosion broke, the stock value of Elon Musk’s company’s Space X, Tesla and SolarCity plummeted a combined $390 million, according to the Daily Mail.
Pre-launch accidents are “extremely unusual” for U.S. spacecraft, Marco Caceres, a senior space analyst with Teal Group, said via phone.
An anomaly in the rocket’s second stage, which uses kerosene and liquid oxygen as fuel, sparked a massive fireball that consumed the Falcon 9 rocket. It was destroyed in the explosion, SpaceX said.
The entire craft was engulfed in what seemed like seconds, including Facebook’s $200 million communication satellite that was specifically created to bring internet to Africa. The billionaire Richard Branson said it when Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed in the Mojave Desert in the fall of 2014, killing one test pilot and seriously injuring another. Saturday’s launch was to be the ninth of the year for the company, which had settled into a steady tempo of flights following a June 2015 accident that grounded its rockets for six months.
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It was the first attempt by the company’s Internet.org initiative to deliver Internet signals from space.
