The members of the worldwide Space Station will have to wait a bit longer for their supplies to arrive, following the latest SpaceX mission failure.
Advertisement
Meanwhile, NASA reported that the astronauts aboard the space station have enough rations – food, water and other supplies – to last them until October of this year.
NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, William H. Debris from the breakup fell into the Atlantic Ocean without causing damage or injury on the ground. The commercial cargo program was created to accommodate loss of cargo vehicles.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket broke apart about 2 minutes after launching the company’s robotic Dragon cargo capsule toward the orbiting lab Sunday (June 28). It’s the third blow in the gut in just a couple of months.
“The escape system slated for the second version of Dragon would have – should certainly have taken the astronauts to a safe place after an anomaly like this”, said SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell.
In fact, the ill-fated Dragon flight was the first ISS-bound resupply mission since the loss of Russia’s Progress carrier that was left tumbling in the Earth’s orbit due to a failure during separation from the Soyuz rocket.
“This is real science and failures are to be expected, sometimes catastrophic ones, but we are not going to let this deter us”, said Rachel Lindbergh, one of the student microgravity researchers. Stakeholders are in constant contact to discuss what went wrong and how to prevent it. SpaceX rockets have had several successful missions for NASA, but Sunday’s launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida turned out to be a disaster.
Investigators still don’t know what caused the Falcon 9, which had flown successfully 18 previous times, to disintegrate. Those missions included six station cargo runs for NASA under a 15 flight contract.
“That’s all we can say with confidence right now”, Musk said via Twitter.
Advertisement
In the meantime, Sunday’s accident has postponed the SpaceX launch of a sea-measuring satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scheduled for early August, according to NOAA spokesman John Leslie.
