Though sad about the accident involving an unmanned SpaceX rocket on Sunday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) promised to the press that they would continue with worldwide Space Station (ISS) operations. So the loss of the SpaceX rocket does not pose an immediate threat for them.
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Again, Bolden reiterates, “We will work with and support SpaceX to assess what happened, understand the specifics of the failure and correct it to move forward”.
SpaceX’s COO and president, Gwynne Shotwell, said that the problem occurred in the vehicle’s general location.
Elon Musk and co. are frantically working to find out what really went wrong and make any fixes if they’re required, so that the company’s investors and customers both can sleep more soundly.
The actual cause of the vehicle’s failure is still unclear. It was the third cargo ship to be lost in the past few months heading to the worldwide Space Station.
Just a little more than 2 minutes into flight, there was a major failure with the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.
Falcon 9 experienced a problem shortly before first stage shutdown with the vehicle experiencing a glitch on ascent.
“Cause still unknown after several thousand engineering-hours of review”, said SpaceX CEO Elun Musk in a Tweet on Monday.
SpaceX will be competing for Pentagon satellite launches against the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT), breaking a monopoly the two have had since 2006. SpaceX’s Hans Koenigsmann will lead the investigation into the Commercial Resupply Services 7 (CRS-7) launch anomaly. Now, if we were to look on the bright side here, it should be noted that the Dragon capsule was only carrying goods and not people so fortunately no lives were lost on Sunday.
“There is a capability to take supplies up to the worldwide Space Station with the European Space Agency”, Redfern said. It marks the second failed mission to resupply the orbital research station this year, casting doubts over the future of the private space industry.
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Russian Federation hopes to return its troubled Soyuz rocket and Progress cargo ship to flight on Friday.
