The Amos-6 was Facebook’s first satellite. They further explained that the anomaly began around the upper stage oxygen tank and occurred during propellant loading of the vehicle. The CEO of Space X, Elon Musk has tweeted about the incident in his Twitter account.
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The satellite was meant to provide free (limited) Internet to various regions of the African continent, as part of Internet.org, a Facebook project that aims to bring cheap and affordable Internet to people around the globe. The rocket’s payload, an Israeli-built communications satellite for Facebook due to launch on Saturday, was also destroyed, it added.
Chloi Rad is an Associate Editor for IGN.
Then there’s Eutelsat, the French satellite operator that partnered with Facebook on the lease, who ran the numbers and expects this #epicfail to cost them 45 million euros in revenue over the next 3 years.
In the video, it was clearly seen that an anomaly was passing over the Falcon 9 and when it was exactly on the top of the rocket, the rocket exploded.
No one was injured in the massive blast that left a Falcon 9 rocket engulfed in flames in Cape Canaveral on Thursday.
Cape Canaveral after SpaceX’s September 1 rocket explosion. The company has launched 25 rockets from the site since 2010.
He then went on to say that Facebook has other technologies like Aquila (that epic internet-beaming drone) that can connect people, as well.
An explosion Thursday at SpaceX’s main launchpad destroyed a rocket as well as a satellite that Facebook was counting on to spread Internet service in Africa. “Per standard structure, the pad was clear and there were no injuries”.
The last time a launch pad sustained heavy damage was in October 2014 when an Orbital Antares rocket exploded seconds after liftoff from Wallops Island, Virginia.
It’s the same kind of SpaceX rocket used to launch space station supplies for NASA, and represented a major setback for the space agency’s plans for future cargo hauls and, ultimately, astronaut flights. SpaceX was planning up to nine Falcon 9 launches by the end of 2016, all of which will now be delayed.
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In the meantime, launches of a variety of satellites, including a NASA space station resupply mission scheduled for launch in November, remain on hold pending the results of the failure investigation.
