The explosion – heard and felt for miles around – dealt a severe blow to SpaceX, still scrambling to catch up with satellite deliveries following a launch accident past year.
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Buildings several miles away shook from the blast, and multiple explosions continued for several minutes – one right after another.
Pictures of black smoke rising from the SpaceX launch complex were circulating on Twitter.
The rocket was scheduled to launch the Amos-6 communications satellite early Saturday morning.
Facebook was due to use the Amos-6 satellite to provide broadband internet coverage for swathes of sub-Saharan Africa as part of the social media giant s Internet.org initiative.
SpaceX said in a statement there were no injuries, but that an “anomaly” during the static fire test resulted in the loss of the rocket and the Israeli communications satellite it had been due to carry into space at the weekend. He said Facebook has already developed other technologies, like a fleet of solar-powered aircraft called Aquila, to bring the internet to more regions.
Little information has been made available and SpaceX spokesman, John Taylor, told the AP he could not comment as he worked to gather information on the circumstances surrounding the explosion.
The company has a second launch site at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, and it has also leased one of the old space shuttle launch pads adjacent to its Cape Canaveral site. The Company has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to fly cargo resupply missions to the ISS, and a total of more than $10 billion in contracts for launches of commercial satellites and the NASA missions, its website says.
It still isn’t clear just how badly the latest explosion damaged the company’s launch pad, which it had been leasing from the US Air Force.
“I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite”, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post. At first it sounded like lightning but more explosions followed.
Officials at the center advised workers to remain inside until further notice, but Brevard County Emergency Management said there was no threat to the public from the incident.
While the cause for the explosion has not been ascertained yet, the preliminary reports have indicated that the the cause was related to the upper stage oxygen tanks.
It’s the same kind of SpaceX rocket used to launch space station supplies for NASA.
Another Falcon 9 was destroyed during a June 2015 launch. The satellite was supposed to ride SpaceX’s Falcon 9 into orbit.
Musk set up SpaceX with the goal of slashing launch costs to make travel to Mars affordable.
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NASA later put out a statement, saying the space agency remains confident in its commercial partners, SpaceX included.
