The third time was not a charm for resupply missions to the worldwide Space Station (ISS), as the failure of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket just seconds after launch on Sunday shows.
Advertisement
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) defended SpaceX on Monday after its Falcon 9 rocket exploded two minutes after a launch over the weekend.
The Falcon 9’s failure is the first in 19 launches and would have been SpaceX’s seventh cargo-hauling trip to the space station under a $1.6 billion NASA contract. He says it was not clear how the disaster occurred.
While NASA and SpaceX continue to search for answers to the questions of why and how the latest resupply mission prematurely ended in a dramatic explosion, others are mourning the loss of cargo.
Russian Federation also lost a supply shipment in April when its Progress capsule spun out of control.
The other U.S.-based company sending cargo into orbit for NASA – Orbital Sciences Corp. – lost an Antares rocket and a loaded Cygnus cargo capsule in afiery crash last October.
Two other student science teams from Colorado also had experiments involving algae and bacteria on board the doomed rocket.
Water would run out about the same time, according to the slides, in the event the station’s water processing system failed.
The Falcon 9 exploded a little over two minutes after liftoff.
Private US space companies were seen as a way to bring that business home. “The longer they wait to launch again, the more people start talking about, ‘Maybe we were too overconfident about SpaceX, ‘” he told AFP.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER – Are we nearing a cliff where the safety of astronauts aboard the worldwide Space Station could be jeopardized by a lack of supplies? Reuters said SpaceX’s customers are still waiting to hear what exactly went wrong and how the company plans to fix it to ensure the next launches are successful.
Going to space has always been a risky endeavor, but few expected such a spectacular failure from SpaceX.
SpaceX has almost 50 launches, worth more than $7-billion, on its schedule. The big problem though is that now the SpaceX rocket can not be trusted anymore. Since the explosion, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has briefed me on all known details surrounding the loss of the SpaceX cargo resupply mission.
The commercial crew program is one of the components for a revitalized space program and more launches in Central Florida. Failure would nearly certainly force further delays in the crew launch, as well as a drastic reshuffle in the payloads for future robotic flights. He said experts were now focusing on the final milliseconds of the flight in order to determine a cause.
Advertisement
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.
