“Cause still unknown. More soon”.
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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 previous year.
Musk’s Hawthorne, California-based company has shaken up the space industry by introducing cost competition and successfully landing rocket boosters to be reused.
The satellite was to be used by Facebook to deliver internet to communities and businesses in Sub-Saharan Africa. A video shows an initial fireball erupting in an upper portion of the Falcon rocket. At first it sounded like lightning but more explosions followed.
The blast took place at 9.07am and there was not one but a series of explosions that continued to happen for over four minutes.
Dark smoke filled the overcast sky and a black cloud hung low across the eastern horizon half an hour later.
SpaceX have stated that an “anomaly” occurred while the rocket was being fuelled at the launch site in Cape Canaveral, causing the explosion. It said no casualties were reported and that there was no threat to the public’s safety.
Because the pad was still burning, it remained off-limits to everyone as the afternoon wore on. “Per standard operating procedure, all personnel were clear of the pad and there were no injuries”.
Zuckerberg has naturally presented Internet.org as a philanthropic endeavor, but critics see it as evidence of Facebook’s ambition to be a globally dominant technology force.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is now visiting Africa, said he was “deeply disappointed” to hear that the satellite had been destroyed.
It is the second Amos satellite to be lost in the past 12 months.
In July 2016, Facebook announced it had completed the first test flight in a year-long programme for its Aquila drone. It’s also working on a crew capsule to ferry station US astronauts; that first flight was supposed to come as early as next year. Mission Control did not immediately advise them of the accident.
The loss, although a hard blow, won’t permanently harm the growing development of commercial space activity, industry observers said.
If there are SpaceX mission delays, other cargo spacecraft will be able to meet the space station’s cargo needs, and supplies and research investigations are at good levels. No one was injured during the explosion, but both the Falcon 9 rocket and the Amos-6 communication satellite were destroyed. Now that lineup is in jeopardy. While the company has not yet achieved a manned space flight, it has secured contracts with NASA to shuttle American astronauts to the ISS in the future. Boeing also is working to develop a crew capsule for NASA.
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NASA said in a tweet that Thursday’s SpaceX explosion “reminds us that spaceflight is challenging”.
