Falcon 9 experienced a problem shortly before first stage shutdown with the vehicle experiencing a glitch on ascent. “Now parsing data with a hex editor to recover final milliseconds”. Unfortunately merely two minutes after liftoff the Falcon 9 rocket exploded in mid-air, fortunately though it was an unmanned mission so there was no loss of life. “It just shows the challenges facing engineering and the challenges of space flight in general”, NASA associate administrator William Gerstenmaier said.
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The three astronauts now aboard the ISS have sufficient stores of food and water to last for the next several months.
He said investigation was ongoing because SpaceX doesn’t know yet what caused it.
Representatives state that they aren’t entirely sure what caused the most recent SpaceX failure; however, the coming weeks and months will be filled with tests that will, hopefully, let us understand exactly what occurred. The rocket was carrying supplies to the worldwide Space Station.
The loss of cargo through this failure is significant.
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.
“Watched #Dragon launch from @space_station Sadly failed Space is hard Teams assess below @NASAKennedy #YearInSpace”, Tweeted NASA astronaut Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) who will be spending a year in the worldwide Space station.
SpaceX’s live webcast of the launch went silent about two minutes 19 seconds into the flight and soon after the rocket could be seen exploding and small pieces tumbling back toward Earth.
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With Russian Federation all set to make its first attempt since losing a supply capsule in April, the incident might put added pressure on this resupply launch scheduled for Friday. At a joint press conference with NASA and SpaceX today, space spokesmen assured that the ISS inhabitants can hold out until the next supply. In October this year, SpaceX’s USA rival Orbital Sciences lost its Antares rocket with a Cygnus cargo carrier aboard in a fireball launch-pad explosion.
