“SpaceX has demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in its first six cargo resupply missions to the station, and we know they can replicate that success”, wrote Bolden.
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A malfunction occurred “in the upper-stage liquid oxygen tank”, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted. Musk says that engineers use now a hex editor parsing the data to reconstruct what happened in the last milliseconds before the explosion.
The SpaceX rocket incident is the third cargo ship in a row lost over the past eight months.
NASA’s spokesperson, George Diller, said, “We appear to have had a launch vehicle failure”.
NASA’s headquarters senior official William Gerstenmaier wants to clarify that no negligence happened, and the incident was purely accident which is why they want to understand what went wrong in order to move forward and avoid the same thing for future flights. In a statement issued Sunday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the astronauts are safe aboard the station and have sufficient supplies for the next several months.
“We would be remiss to underestimate the gravity of the situation right now”, Nelson said today, noting, however, that SpaceX has made seven previous successful flights to the ISS for NASA. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded minutes after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida, following what was meant to be a routine cargo mission to the worldwide Space Station.
The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
NASA has contracted SpaceX for sending supplies to the worldwide Space Station and about 20 commercial and other satellite operators. SpaceX has launched seven missions to the ISS under a contract with NASA.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean shortly after its lift-off on Sunday. The capsule was carrying 4,000 pounds of food and supplies to the space station, where American Scott Kelly and Russia’s Mikhail Kornienko are spending a year in space. For now, crews at the space station have enough supplies until October.
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Both failures make the next resupply mission set for July 3 especially crucial.
