SpaceX said on Friday it would shift Florida flights to a almost completed second site after damage to its launch pad on Thursday caused by the explosion of an unmanned Falcon 9 rocket belonging to the space services company run by Elon Musk.
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SpaceX has released a short statement to Reuters confirming that an “anomaly” occurred on the launch pad during test firing which resulted in the loss of both the vehicle and the payload. The Israel Aerospace Industries AMOS-6 satellite reportedly cost million and was built for satellite services company Spacecom to relay Internet broadband in Africa and television to Europe and the Middle East.
A SpaceX rocket that exploded on its launchpad caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage and left people thinking nearby buildings were about to collapse.
The rocket was carrying a Facebook satellite which would be providing connectivity to across the Africa continent.
U.S. Rep. John Mica said he expected SpaceX to work hard to get back on its feet after the massive loss of equipment and payload. The first failure involved a catastrophic mid air explosion about two and a half minutes after liftoff, during a cargo resupply launch for NASA to the International Space Station on June 28, 2015 – and witnessed by this author.
The satellite launch was to expand Facebook’s presence in Africa by beaming internet from the sky.
Shares of Musk’s companies Tesla Motors and SolarCity were down 4 per cent at $203.65 and 5.5 per cent at $19.50 respectively in morning trade. “Per standard procedure, the pad was clear and there were no injuries”, SpaceX said via Twitter.
SpaceX had planned to dispatch nine more missions before the end of the year, including two flights to place a 20-member satellite network into orbit for Iridium. The CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk who is an internet Entrepreneur and wants the launch industry to revolutionise by making the rocket components reusable. Japan’s Hayabusa mission sent home tiny pieces of the asteroid Itokawa in 2010, and Hayabusa 2 launched in December 2014 to snag samples from a different space rock. The firm noted that the sale was contingent upon the successful launch of the Amos-6, planned from Cape Canaveral, planned for this Saturday, Sept. 3. Earlier this year, it successfully broke a monopoly by United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, to win a military satellite launch contract. Upgrades at the SpaceX pad at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base are close to completion.
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The achievement made SpaceX the first every commercial company to visit the ISS.
