CDA News reported that the space exploration technologies company’s Falcon 9 rocket with a robotic Dragon cargo capsule exploded shortly after takeoff from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
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Hawthorne company Space X announced on Monday that their Falcon 9 rocket would not launch for “a couple months”. The metal strut, which was bought from a supplier, was created to hold down a helium bottle as the rocket reaches its second stage.
The company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, said of the pause: “We’re taking more time than we originally envisioned to get back to flight”.
The company is developing an improved version of the Falcon 9 expected to be 30 percent more powerful, she said.
According to NBC News, the Falcon 9 launch failure, along with the failed October 28 launch of an Orbital ATK rocket, has left NASA dependent on Japan and Russian Federation to resupply the worldwide Space Station.
Back on June 28, a Falcon 9 rocket intended to launch a cargo ship to the ISS blew up about two minutes into launch.
Musk, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal who additionally heads Tesla Motors, stated that SpaceX had had a seven-year document of security in flight till the accident occurred.
SpaceX president revealed that the problem that caused the last launch failure was relatively easy to fix, but the engineers are being extra cautious in the hunt for other potential issues.
“What we wanted to do was to take advantage of the lessons that we learned from that particular failure and make sure we’re not seeing something like that anywhere throughout the vehicle”. To this Gerstenmaier replied that alongside SpaceX, NASA, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are also involved in the investigation.
SpaceX has a backlog of almost 50 launches, worth more than $7 billion, on its schedule.
As a crucial step toward that goal, the company is sticking to its plans of successfully landing its first stage rocket booster this year, Shotwell said.
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The next mission on SpaceX’s launch calendar was supposed to be a US government ocean-monitoring satellite called Jason 3, but Shotwell indicated that a commercial communications satellite would move to the front of the line.
