“SpaceX remains certified and can compete for the upcoming GPS III launch service”, Lt. General Samuel Greaves, who heads the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center, wrote in an email to Reuters.
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The partnership between NASA and Microsoft planned a set of HoloLens devices to be sent to the worldwide Space Station to aid with communications and training with new software called Sidekick.
NASA says the accident confirmed a few minutes into the flight from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
“There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank”, Musk Tweeted.
There doesn’t appear to be any common theme behind the rash of failed missions, aside from the thin margin between success and catastrophe for rocket launches, NASA officials said. “We can actually learn from this failure – understand a weakness or a flaw in the design that we might not have seen for a while, and so this could actually lower some of the speculation about how we want to move forward and how we want to work on the crew design”. “The commercial cargo program was designed to accommodate loss of cargo vehicles”, he said, according to The Washington Post. It was the third fiery demise of a vehicle ferrying supplies to the worldwide Space Station since October. It’s yet another challenge to NASA’s plans to let private companies handle such launches as it trains its sights deeper into space.
A Russian cargo ship attempting to resupply the space station spun out of control in April and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere in May. Orbital’s Antares and its Cygnus cargo capsule are not yet ready to go back into operation. Orbital ATK, NASA’s other commercial cargo partner, is moving ahead with plans for its next launch later this year. Unfortunately they were destroyed when the unmanned rocket transporting the products blew up just minutes into it’s flight. Today’s launch attempt will not deter us from our ambitious human spaceflight program,”Bolden said”.
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The failure “has impacted the projected launch date for the Jason-3 mission”, NOAA said in an e-mailed statement, without elaborating.
